The Garbage of Life

Last night at church one of the men gave an analogy about the junk from our past and the junk in a garbage dump. It went something like this:
When rubbish is downloaded into a dump, it's packed down into layer upon layer. The more time passes, the more the garbage shifts and compacts. If there was something you needed to get out of the dump that was deposited even just months before, it's already been buried by a small mountain of other garbage. You'll have to root around down there until you hook onto it, but when you try to pull it out, it's going to be caught on a whole lot of other rubbish. Some of that rubbish will stick with it and come out when it does, but other rubbish will be tangled with something else that keeps any of the rubbish from coming up out of the dump with any ease.
When we try to get to the source of negative thinking in our lives, we'll usually find that's hard to do. We can identify a certain memory that contributed to something - let's say self doubt. So someone remembers that her father repeatedly told her that she couldn't do anything by herself. She's found the rubbish that's the source of her current problems and she forgives it. It's done, over with, gone.
Not even! That rubbish is hooked onto something else. Maybe her mom wouldn't ever let her help with any of the household chores. That's going to be a real hard one to find because she doesn't even recognize it as a negative thing!
So the point is that most of us live on a garbage dump of a past. God will help us get out all the garbage, but it's going to take time and a lot of patient work. It's worth the effort. What you need to do is keep a focus on the end goal - a new life as a truly joyful person.
Be forewarned though, once you've asked God to start the process, he's not going to quit, no matter how much you whine when thing get stinky down in the dump. Learn to plug your nose and keep at it. Someday you'll have a beautiful, sweet smelling flower garden.