recycled tears

There is a show in the art gallery right now that I can't think of the name of at the moment, but I have thought a lot about it lately. Last Tuesday I went to a panel discussion about the art by various Biola faculty. Of the people that spoke, what professor Dorothy Calley and Dr. Joanne Jung said stuck out to me the most. Calley spoke of a piece that I didn't even want to see that dealt with emptying and re-filling, and Dr. Jung spoke about a sculpture that fascinated me that was about "recycled" tears. Calley mentioned how she hated the piece yet she had to stare at it and came back several times to contemplate it. Sometimes those things that repulse us most are those things that we most need to confront. Dr. Jung mentioned in recycled tears the returning again and again to the same tears, to remembering and re-processing the same hurts and the same memories again and again. I feel like I definitely have been recycling tears lately. I continuously return to my past and make steps backwards trying to return to it rather than being willing to let go and see where my future takes me. Today I was reading through Acts and spent some time in prayer and felt myself flooded with the need to give my recycled tears to God to allow him to take my past and to mold me and create me into the person who will move forward and not look back. This then goes to the piece with the carcasses that was so disturbing and that I didn't enjoy at all. I need to be filled with God and his desires for me, but how can I be filled with those things if I don't allow him to empty me of things that I shouldn't be focusing on? Yes, parts of my past are glorious, but to continuously focus on them doesn't allow for growth or forward movement. Then, tonight at singspo I again felt like God was asking me for my past... and for all of me, to let him empty me and refill me with himself.