By Samuel Medina/reporter
It’s the very things in people’s pasts that can fuel their future, a speaker told South students and faculty March 24.
Celebrating Women’s History Month, Yolanda Butler, co-pastor of Fort Worth Praise Center Community Church, said the past does not have to be a burden but can be a tool for success in Leading the Future, Linking the Past.
“We don’t want to deal with our past,” she said. “The past can be a plague in your present.”
Photo by Katelyn Townsend
Butler spoke of depression, abandonment and other hardships she went through. All of that changed when she stopped living for people and began living for God, she said.
She spoke highly of her single mother who raised Butler alone when her father left.
“I took it as abandonment and prayed for him to say he loved me,” she said.
Butler said she carried those thoughts with her until she got married and realized the past was hanging over her joyous time of living.
“I stopped living and existing,” she said. “I became very depressed.”
She did not know how to coexist with her past, but her husband’s unconditional love for her opened her mind.
How one handles the past determines the future, she said.
“You know who you are and where you are going,” she said.
Butler thanked everything that made up her past because the grief she went through only shows how strong she is.
“If my grandmother can lose her husband to cancer and raise 11 kids by herself, then we can do even greater things with what we have,” she said.
People often wish they could forget the past, but the past is what made someone the strong man or strong woman of today, Butler said.
“If you can survive the past, you can survive it now,” she said. “People will ask you, how are you even alive? It is because you are a masterpiece.”
The past is not the tormentor, but a motivator, Butler said. All of the people who hate someone recognize that person as a threat. So the individual needs to feed off of that.
“You’ve got things that nobody has inside of them — dreams, soul, books, knowledge and countless other things that make you unique,” she said.
