Redeeming Your Past: Seeing God’s Hand in Your Story
Copyright Dave Wiedis 2025, originally published on New Growth Press’s blog
Most of us carry stories—some beautiful, others heartbreaking. For many, the weight of past trauma or failure can feel like a mark of shame or a permanent limitation. But what if the very pain you’ve experienced is not a barrier to your calling but a bridge toward it? What if, instead of disqualifying us, our wounds become the soil where God cultivates healing and purpose?
This concept lies at the heart of The Spiritually Healthy Leader: Finding Freedom from Self-Sabotage, where I explore how our “ruling passions”—deep, unexamined emotional drivers rooted in past wounds—can sabotage our spiritual lives until we learn to reinterpret them through God’s redemptive lens and are brought under the healing and truth of God’s sovereignty. God is in control of all things. Nothing happens apart from his divine plan. Nothing happens by accident. And God can take our tragedies, pain, hurts, losses, and even abuse and redeem them for his glory.
Be a Good Steward of Your Past
One of the most liberating truths is this: You have the exact past God allowed you to have.
This doesn’t mean that everything in your past was good, right, or godly. It means that nothing is wasted in the hands of a sovereign God. You can’t change your past, but you can steward it well, letting it become part of God’s redemptive story. As Dan Allender has noted, you don’t have a story; you are God’s story!
Scripture makes this clear: the most grievous act in human history—the crucifixion of Jesus—was both evil and part of God’s definite plan (Acts 2:23–24; 4:27–28). God’s sovereignty never excuses sin, but it does mean that even sin and suffering do not thwart God’s purposes.
Joseph
Few biblical stories illustrate this better than Joseph’s. As a result of his brothers’ abuse, Joseph spends decades separated from his family and endures harsh treatment in Egypt. He is falsely accused of attempted rape and left languishing in prison for years.
Despite this abuse, Joseph remains faithful to God and seeks to honor him, even when victimized over many years.
In Genesis 45 we see how God sovereignly accomplishes his purposes through Joseph’s suffering. Through events orchestrated by God, Joseph eventually becomes second-in-command in Egypt, and his brothers stand before him. Given his power and their grievous sins against him, Joseph could have taken revenge. But rather than using his past wounds to justify disobeying God, he says,
“Do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. . . . So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.”
Genesis 45:5, 8 NIV
Joseph reframes his suffering in light of God’s providence. He sees that God has not abandoned him but has been working all along, shaping his character and using his wounds to save many.
We learn two significant lessons from Joseph:
Joseph saw God’s sovereign, providential hand, even in his brothers’ evil actions.
Although Joseph endured terrible injustices, he did not blame God or himself and refused to internalize bitterness. Had he believed the lie that he was worthless or cursed, he might have walked a very different, self-sabotaging path.
This is a spiritual reframing of experience. It is not denial but truthful interpretation through God’s redemptive lens—a practice that helps transform ruling passions into a life of spiritual health.
Paul
Another example is the apostle Paul, who was no stranger to trauma, abuse, and adversity. Paul was
stoned,
abandoned by ministry partners,
beaten and jailed,
shipwrecked,
mocked,
endangered by riots,
bitten by a snake,
sentenced to death.
Yet Paul interpreted his pain through the lens of God’s redemptive purposes and used his suffering as an opportunity to love God and others.
Paul explains,
[God] comforts us in all our troubles,
so that we can comfort those in any trouble
with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
Paul understood that his painful experiences were not liabilities, but invitations to steward his suffering and depend on Christ more deeply. That insight—that transformation happens when we surrender our wounds to God’s healing grace—helps us live under the supremacy of Christ and love others well.
Your Wounds Can Speak
Henri Nouwen’s perspective in The Living Reminder is helpful: “Forgetting the past is like turning our most intimate teacher against us. . . . What is forgotten is unavailable, and what is unavailable cannot be healed.”
That perspective has been crucial in my own healing journey from heartbreak—the loss of my first marriage. I tried to numb the pain through relational consumption. The lie I believed was “I am unlovable.” That lie shaped my ruling passion—to not be lonely—for years.
But God redeemed even that. He showed me that what I had been using to protect myself was keeping me from the very intimacy I longed for. In time, he used my story to help others walk through abandonment and rejection.
Comfort Received Becomes Comfort Given
Your story—redeemed and reframed—can give others hope. It is a process of identifying your ruling passions and false narratives and replacing them with truth rooted in God’s character.
Joni Eareckson Tada has said, “God will permit what He hates to accomplish what He loves.” This truth provided Joni with assurance that God despises suffering. Jesus spent much of his time relieving people of suffering, but because we live in a fallen world, God allows his people to suffer to accomplish what he loves.
Joni’s insight echoes Paul’s and Joseph’s stories—and likely yours as well. Whether it’s betrayal, addiction, shame, or chronic pain, God redeems even our darkest moments for his glory and our good.
Understanding our experiences through the lens of God’s redemptive purposes is essential to healing and transforming our ruling passions. Recognizing and reinterpreting our pain is foundational to walking in freedom and purpose.
Invitation
So I invite you to reflect:
What painful experiences are you trying to ignore or hide?
What inaccurate meanings have you assigned to those experiences?
What would it look like to let God reinterpret them through the lens of truth and grace?
You can’t change your past, but you can let God use it.
Your story is not over. God is still writing.
Let him redeem every line.
