Recently, I have gone back and read through my journal from 1995. By that time, I had been keeping a daily journal for ten years (I started January 1, 1985 – one of my few New Year’s resolutions that actually stuck). It was the year I graduated from college. My dad had just died the previous December from cancer. And I was still figuring out what exactly to do with my life.

Reading through my journal from those days, I feel a welling-up of compassion for that young man. I realize now that I was more anxious about the future than I wanted to be, I was more deeply entrenched in grief than I was aware at the time, I was disappointed that my post-graduation plans weren’t materializing like I’d expected, and I was more opinionated than I thought I was. So what would I say now to that young man then?

When I posed this question at our HeBrews men’s coffee group on Tuesday morning about what advice would you give to your younger self, one of the guys chipped in immediately with “relax!” I think my advice would be similar. I would want to tell my younger self to relax and to lighten up.

To lighten up on myself, and on others, and to trust that I would eventually find my way, and that healing would come. To trust more in the words of a passage of scripture I was beginning to be drawn to even then, that “we know that God works all things together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Because in the thirty plus years since then, that promise has proven to be true.

So what would you want to say to your younger self? And if you could project yourself out another thirty years from now, what do you imagine your future self telling your present self?