The last 16 years has been a time of transition for me.

For the first 50 years of my life I was deeply entrenched in evangelical Christian sub-culture, where the church was at the centre of everything I did, and its precepts and norms shaped my life. And then I left my marriage. I committed one of the biggest taboos of the Christian faith – I divorced.

Interestingly, the sky did not fall.

I still felt loved by God. But the shape of my faith began to change. Church was still very much part of my life. In fact, I trained as a Salvation Army Officer, became an ordained minister, and completed an honours degree in theology. But the more deeply I looked at the Bible and understood the contexts in which its many books were written over thousands of years I came to see that interpretations of any written words are nuanced and shaped by the people who read them. And I realised that much of the church’s teachings reflected cultural norms that were given weight and legitimacy by Bible verses. For instance, the Bible has been used in the past to justify slavery because slaves and masters are specifically mentioned in some of the letters written by Paul.

After I left the Salvos in 2016 to pursue my dream of building a speaking business, I found that not only was I building a new life but I was shaping a new identity, outside of the norms, expectations and boundaries of church teaching. I was getting in touch with who I really was away from what the church had told me a woman could be. And here was the rub. I found it difficult to marry the identity that had been mine for more than 50 years with the new ways in which I was now living, thinking and seeing myself.

The past – mine and yours, collective and individual – shapes who we are now. There is no escaping that fact. While the past shapes us it does not define us. And we can choose to write a new story. But, the story of the past is still with us even though the life of the present is very different to what we’ve left behind.

And this is where courage comes in. It takes courage to write a new story without ignoring the story that brought us here. It takes courage to find ways to hold both the past and the present in tension, to live into a new reality and identity without succumbing to the temptation of trying to negate all the past and its influences. Who I was for the first 50-60 years of my life got me to where I am today. I can learn from that person. I can be grateful for that person. I can be proud of that person for doing the best she could.

But I no longer need to be that person.