Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. This is the promise that drew me to Christianity initially. I was broken. I'd failed. I wanted to escape my past. And Paul said: that's possible. In Christ, all things become new. The old is gone.
But I'm realizing the promise is more subtle than I understood. The old doesn't just disappear. It's not like you snap your fingers and your trauma is erased, your failures forgotten, your mistakes unmade. I've been in recovery for three years, and my past is still real. But it's been transformed. It has meaning now. It teaches. It informs compassion.
So 'all things become new' doesn't mean the past is deleted. It means the past is given new significance within the new creature. The old is passed away in the sense that it no longer defines me, no longer runs me. But I'm learning to see it as part of the story of how God formed me. I'm new, and my past is integrated into that newness, not erased from it.
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