I’d rather forget and not slow down than gather regret for the things I can’t change now. If I become what I can’t accept, resurrect the saint from within the retch. Pour over me and wash my hands of this.
Let me tell you a story about a little girl who was mad at the entire world.
She had beaten down, pushed around, and had her heart broken so many times that all she wanted to do was give up, and the only solace she took was in the words of her favorite song.
That song came into her life right before she hit her lowest. And when she fell, she fell hard. She ate her feelings, filling up her body with large portions of food and causing herself to gain more weight than she knew she should have. She wrote nasty things in her journals and drew horrible images. She just wanted to die, but she couldn’t bring herself to actually do it. She thought she was a coward, and she hated herself.
The year after she hit her lowest, she attended a camp where the speaker for the week spoke to her heart and she ended up talking with one of the counselors after he preached. She told him what was happening and that she just couldn’t take it, and he sat her down and read her the Bible verse Philippians 3:13:
Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, […]
Staring in awe, she told him: “Those are the words to my favorite song.” The song that had kept her sane on her journey through hell. Because every time she listened to it, she knew she would be OK.
It was at that moment she decided that she would get those words forever engraved on her forearm so that, no matter how horrible she felt and no matter how much she thought it couldn’t get better, she would know that she could forget her past and look towards the future without losing momentum.
That little girl was me, and this is my tattoo (I’m sorry, the picture is awful and I will try to get a better one). It’s extremely important to me, and the artist who did it was amazing. I have been waiting 3 years to get this particular tattoo, and am so glad that I did. Now I don’t have to re-write it every time it washes off. It will always be there.
