Our past can feel like the wrong ingredients for a quality life recipe. But the case of the Apostle Paul shows God thinks otherwise. He does not waste our past but uses it as He sends us out as agents of the same transformation we have received.
Sometimes we become so fixed on where we want to go that we cannot see how we are defeating ourselves. Jonah runs in the opposite direction when God sends him to Nineveh, raising questions we often avoid: Do we understand who God is, who we are, and how He sees the people we would rather leave behind?
What happens when the life you planned collapses and your worst failure seems to have settled what you can ever become? Exodus 3–4 brings that question to Moses, a fugitive tending sheep in the wilderness, when the holy God calls him from a burning bush and sends him toward the people and place he fled.