Have you ever been stuck? I was literally stuck once. When I was in high school, I drove my car to the beach with some friends for a week. (I’m not completely sure what my parent’s were thinking just then…) One day we were cruising up and down the strip, at Panama City Beach, when I decided to turn the car around and drive in the other direction.

I pulled into what looked like a good turnaround only to find it was about a foot deep in seashells. I got stuck. The more I tried to free the car, the deeper the tires dug into the shells. The car was going nowhere fast. We all piled out of the car to assess the situation. Yep. We decided we were definitely stuck.

While we stood there pondering what to do, some young men (of course) pulled over and offered to help us. We turned on our best Southern Bell accents and gladly accepted their help. They located a couple of boards and dug most of the shells out from under the tires until the tires could grab some traction and, with a little push, we were on our way once again.

I’ve been stuck other times, too. It happens every time I stop that forward motion. It happens when I allow my mind to stray back to a time when I was experiencing failure, loss, anger, disappointment, or even happiness or achievement. If we are not careful, we can dig ourselves into a pit we cannot escape. We lose traction and there we sit.

When we take those strolls down memory lane, it can cause us to miss those opportunities that are right in front of us. We can spend so much time on what was, (good or bad) and completely miss what is, or what is about to be. I’m not suggesting that we should never take those trips back in time; I’m just saying we can’t just book a one-way flight. Those moments in history are just that. History. The moment ago that you started reading this article is now history. It has fallen to the ground never to live again.

I have a great friend and mentor that encourages me to continue that forward motion. She tells me, “Never go backward; always move forward.”

Your future is ahead of you. Those divine moments of your life are coming. I hope you have had some of those in your past, and it’s nice to revisit those sometimes, but if we camp out there for too long we might miss the next divine moment just on the horizon.

Are you stuck in a moment in time? Maybe you are stuck in several moments at different times. Every time I recount a difficult situation I’ve had with another person, I am stuck in that moment, reliving it over and over again. I recount what they said, then I what I said, and on it goes. I have to purpose to put it behind me and continue moving forward. The same can be true with my “glory days” moments. I can relive the time I won the blue ribbon for the fifty-yard dash in fourth grade again and again. But in reality, that moment is gone, too. I can no more go back than I can invent the time machine that would be necessary to accomplish that.

Our lives are a string of moments each tied together to form our existence. The word “moment” comes from the Latin word that means “momentum” which, itself, indicates motion. Those long dead, past moments we can no longer change also no longer have motion or momentum. This moment, this very moment, now that one has momentum. That one has potential for divine change. Change in direction, change in velocity, and change in purpose.

But only if we are living in it, and not stuck in those past, fallen moments of our lives.

What moments in your past continue to play over and over in your mind? How much time are you spending stuck in those moments you cannot change? How many opportunities or divine moments have you missed because you were stuck?

Need help getting “unstuck”? Let me recommend a great
read by Erwin McManus (Author, speaker, and pastor of
Mosaic Church in LA), It’s called- Chasing Daylight.