Pressure Points and Delete Buttons

Sometimes when we go through life, we "rediscover" things from our past. We're moving right along, then a memory triggers a pressure point in the emotional mind or we run into that person that cut your heart into pieces. You get the idea.

This is where we make a choice. What do we do when those pressure points come?

You know what hurts? It's when the time comes to deal with those pressure points dead on. Somehow, even when we try to hide from them or outrun them, they find a way to catch up with us, and we're forced to choose to deal with them or keep running from them. Sometimes, we even store the hurt in the deep places, but refuse to deal with it out in the open.

I will use a personal example. I just found an old copy of a long message that had been stored in my computer that was sent to someone in response to a hurtful encounter (an encounter that turned into a painful time of my life at that time). I had kept it, just because... maybe I thought someday I would need it to defend my cause. Maybe I thought I needed it just lying around. Whatever the reason, I knew one thing when I found it tonight after it's been sitting there all this time. It did not need to be in my possession anymore. I feel like that hurt was wiped away long ago, and I needed to get rid of the rest of it. I did not need a written account of that old hurt, so delete was a good button to push.

I know when I have asked God to heal me of past hurts, I know He has wrapped His arms around me... but when it comes down to cleaning up the mess the situations have caused, He helps, but sometimes He nudges me to make the first move. The delete button. And you know what was cool about deleting that old copy of hurt? It felt so good to get rid of it! Erased. Gone. Nada. Not that the hurt didn't happen, but I had erased the file that was stored. The written account was no longer in existence. It just made me realize if we put more effort into getting rid of the extra files that we store in our life computers, we would stop storing those things away and start dealing with hurts dead on. The cool part about deleting unwanted files in a computer is the obvious: it frees up more room in the computer's hard drive. Humans are very much so like this, too. Sometimes, we need to clean up the unwanted to leave more room for the new things the Lord is doing.

So when it comes to those stored files on our life computers that represent hurt, baggage, and bonds that keep us from being completely set free... Keep them, or hit delete?