If you’re familiar with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, you’ll resonate with at least one of the ghosts that visits Ebenezer Scrooge during this night of reckoning. There was the Ghost of Christmas Future, the harbinger of terrible things to come. And the Ghost of Christmas Present, a reminder that we never really know what others are going through all around us. But the otherworldly visits in A Christmas Carol begin with the Ghost of Christmas Past, a creature who recalls Scrooge’s memories and brings to his mind the great burden of the past: regret. 

As leaders we all go through life and work holding to past regrets, those disappointments over lost or missed opportunities. We’re sad or repentant over things that we wish we had done differently. What does the Bible tell us about regret? 2 Corinthians 7:10 tells us, “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.” In other words, in Christ we have no reason to regret a past we cannot change. Repentance leads to “salvation without regret”. We need not relive and revive a past that God Himself has chosen to forget.

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, so many leaders are haunted by their past. Sin, mistakes, bad decisions, missed opportunities—like ghosts they hover over us, an unseen force that only we can see but that may negatively affect us in the present. Scripture tells us not to worry about a past we can’t change. How, then, might we deal with our past in a way that chases out the cobwebs and lets us concentrate on the present and future.

We can understand that the past got us here. We must acknowledge that our past shaped us into who we are today. Even our negative experiences are opportunities to learn, to hone our lives and leadership, to make better decisions and change direction, to savor important relationships and to adjust priorities. The past doesn’t rule us anymore, but it can be a window through which we look as we determine where to go next.

Ebenezer Scrooge realized the opportunity provided by a look into his past. He knew the person he was before his ghostly encounters. Dickens wrote, “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.”

When you look at your own past, do you see aspects of yourself that you have been able to grow past? Have you let go and pressed on to a better version of you? Are you able to self-examine your own life and work, and find those areas where you aren’t who you want to be? The past is not to be lived in, but it is a great reminder of who we once were and how far we may have grown (or not grown).

We can look past the past. In Scrooge’s case, he still had to deal with his present and the future before he was shocked out of his selfish ways and ended his Christmas on a happy note. If you’re dealing with a ghost of the past, consider that you cannot change it, but your present and future are completely adjustable. Who you are today and who you will be tomorrow can be entirely different than who you were yesterday.  The Apostle Paul shared his view of the past in Philippians 3:13, writing, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead…” Knowing the past was something he could not change, and that God had forgiven him of his past, Paul simply chose to turn his head and focus on what lay ahead.

Regrets of the past most often deal with past words and actions. To look past regret, the best thing we can do is to have our present and future words and actions be those that reflect who we really want to be. This is why the Apostle Paul stressed “straining forward to what lies ahead”. He urges us to put our focus on that which is within our power to improve.

Extinguishing the past. The great moral of A Christmas Carol is the great difficulty with which a person truly changes. In Scrooge’s case, he had become so self-centered and miserly, so hard-hearted, that it took a vivid look at his own mortality to extricate him from his entrenched ways. To be haunted by your past is to have shame and regret become ghosts in your life and work, perhaps invisible to those around you, but always present in your heart and mind. Just as Christ has forgiven you of your past, as a Christ-follower, you must learn to forgive yourself of that which you cannot change.

The ghost of Christmas past shows Scrooge increasing uncomfortable scenes, to the point that he grabs the ghosts’s hat and holds it down over his head in an attempt to snuff him out. The ghost, though, only glows brighter. The message is clear. One cannot sweep their past “under a hat”, but must eventually deal with it in order to move beyond it. If you are suffering another visit from the ghost of your past, consider how you might open up, confess it to God, and ask God to put opportunities for your present and future before you, so that you don’t have to be under yesterday’s burden any longer. Remember the words of Ebenezer Scrooge: “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”