Choke

There are some authors who write because they know everyone will love their work, and then there are authors who write because they love it and everyone knows it. Chuck Palahnuik definitely falls into the latter category. Most widely known for his novel Fight Club, Palahnuik has penned over a dozen novels, each more dark, harrowing, and controversial than the last. I’ve read a few of his books, and can attest to the fact that underneath the coarse and bizarre surface there is always some modicum of universal truth. Take this passage from the novel Choke:

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.”

Our past doesn’t define us. People can look at what has happened in our lives and judge us for it, but that’s not who we are. That’s who we were. That’s why it’s called our history, not our currently.

When God looks at us, He sees us for what we are and will be like, not what we were like in the past. When the prodigal son came back, his father didn’t scold him for all the bad decisions he had made – he imagined what it would be like with his son back and threw a party in celebration. The son could have looked back on his time spent living among swine and thought, “I’ll never be any better than this. I might as well stay here and eat leftover slop for the rest of my life.” But rather than letting his days in the pigpen define him, he decided to go home, believing that he could do something better with his future. And his father rejoiced.

Don’t let the things you’ve done in the past keep you from what you are meant to do in the future.