The past can shackle us

You have to watch how you deal with the past, because the past can either stimulate or it can stifle you. The past can be of great help and encouragement to you, but the past can also paralyze you. The past can hold you in bondage and memories of the past can shackle you. Norman Harper tells a story in his book Making Disciples of a young housewife who was baking a ham. One of her neighbors happened to come in and was watching her. She noticed that before she put the ham into the pan to bake it, she cut off a third of the ham and set it aside. She asked her why she did that. The housewife said, I learned to bake hams from my mother, and whenever she baked the ham, she used to cut off a third of the ham and set it aside and put the rest in to bake it. I don't really know why I do it. The next time she saw her mother, she asked her, Why is it that you always cut off a part of the hand before you put it into the pan to bake it? Her mother said, Well, I just really don't know, but my mother used to do that, and she used to bake such marvelous hams, so I just figured that's the way you do it. The young housewife went to her grandmother’s to find out what is with the ham. Her grandmother, with a little twinkle in her eye, said, Why, honey, when your granny was a young housewife, we were so poor that we couldn't afford a pan any larger, and so when I had a ham. I had to cut part of it off in order to get it to fit in the pan so I could put it into the oven. Sometimes you can go on and just keep the past going and it can shackle you and hold you in bondage for no reason at all.¹

Dale Ralph Davis