One foot in front of the other.
Don’t stop.
Keep going.
Hours later I look up to see the peak of the mountain just as far away. Frustrated I sit down, overwhelmed with it all. No matter how much I pushed onward, it seemed like I’d never make it.
This is the story of my life.
I have insane, impossible goals that only become possible through the strength and love from God. You see, whenever I reach a goal, its just another stepping-stone to another goal I have so my mountain peak always seems just as distant as ever.
Pushing onward is great, but in having the strength to reach the pinnacle of the mountain, we sometimes need to take a second to shift gears.
I learned the importance of looking back.
Looking back isn’t a bad thing. Looking back gives us the opportunity to see how far we’ve come. I marvel at how far I’ve come through the grace of God.
God gave me two situations where I had the chance to look back at my life. The first was with my best friend, Alyssa Pang. I went over to her house one night and we looked through all our old albums from high school on Facebook. Before we started looking through our old pictures, we were talking about our life struggles as usual. However, after we reminisced about the good old days and everything that we’ve been through together, it really made it obvious how far we’ve come.
Even though we still are doing life and it gets hard at times, it was rejuvenating to look back and see our progress. I’m truly blessed to do life with Alyss!
The second situation happened a few days later. I gathered all my journals from over the years and lined them up by date. I started journaling during my high school years, so I had at least six years worth of my life written down.
I started perusing through them and it was crazy going back in time. It was incredible reading about my life through the lens of junior year in high school Kai or whatever age I was at the time. To see it in the raw—all my challenges, victories, times of sorrow, times of happiness. It was a roller coaster of emotions. So many things I forgot but reading it brought me right back to that moment in time.
I’ve never read through my journals in full before that moment. I’ve never let anyone else read my journals either. It’s a way for me to really express myself in the raw and have that time with God. It was mind blowing looking back and reading about my life.
Looking back gives us the opportunity to see God’s incredible hand on our life and how He kept his promises to us.
This in turn will give us strength to know that He has our life in the palm of His hands and that our life will be amazing.
Each day as we push onward is like putting one pearl on a necklace. Day after day we put a pearl on, but it doesn’t make sense until we look back and see the beautiful necklace we’ve created.
Now when I’m sitting down overwhelmed with the mountain looming ahead, I muster the willpower to stand back up, look back, thank God for how far I’ve come and thank Him for the strength to push onward.
