This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued the FREED series with one of the most personal questions it will raise: can you actually be free from your past? He opened with a number—nine out of ten—his and Christy's combined score on the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment. The score wasn't shared for sympathy, it was shared to make the question real. As James Baldwin wrote, "people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." Sin works the same way. It exerts power by keeping you in what has already happened, but the antidote isn't denial. Pastor Jon called the answer, "eschatological realism" — a clear, inhabitable sense of the future God has for you. When you're living from that future, what the present holds over you loses its grip. Paul is the guide. In Philippians 3, a man with a past that could have defined him entirely writes about forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. Biblical forgetting isn't numbing, rather it's the intentional release of failure, guilt, and the pride that can calcify even around our wounds. In Christ, we've been given an identity more defining than anything we've been through. Scripture gives us a redemptive orientation toward time: a past that has been redeemed, a present marked by wonder, and a future held open by hope.
