My brother had distrusted my driving skill since the day I smashed his car against a wooden pole at the garage of our small compound.’ You are too reckless!’ he said dismissively. I could plead no excuse at the moment, although, any expert could have made the same silly mistake-trust me. At first, I was quite disappointed in my self for having bruised the car, causing a major damage to the new car. I found myself building a story in my head: it’s so unfair, ‘why could it have been me in this mess.’

Then I dug a little deeper to realize why I was feeling so upset. I realize I was making something insignificant into a big deal. I was merely building a story that did not serve me at all. I was too attached to the current situation. I just taught to myself, ‘you know what? It doesn’t matter the story I create, I am still going to pay for this, I may as well accept this and move on!'

Stop looking only at where you are and start looking at what you can be. We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.

‘Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.’

You may succeed if nobody else believes in you, but you will never succeed if you don’t believe in yourself. A focus on the past causes us to miss opportunities in the present and diminishes our perception of God at work in our future. That we are victims of our pasts does not make us prisoners of it.

Don’t spend half your life telling what you are going to do and the other half explaining why you didn’t do it. Forgive yourself of past failures, hurts and feelings. Reach out to the wonderful things that lie ahead of you. A man is not what he’s called; a man is what he responds to. Give up on the stories defining your past so the universe can write a new one for u. Forgiving yourself means more than just learning to live with what has happened. Sometimes, it means you have to rebuild, start from scratch, pull up the old foundations and lay new ones.