By Dawn Onley

I’ll bet many of us can point to things that threatened our start in life. It may have been a learning disability. Or some type of health challenge. It may have been the divorce of your parents or the death of a loved one. Perhaps it was an authoritative figure who said something to make you feel discouraged or a bully who picked on you and made you scared to go to school.

It could have even been a tragedy of some sort.

No matter how terrible it was, no matter how searing the memory of it still is, we shouldn’t allow it to determine how we finish. We should not relinquish the hope of today for the painful memories of yesterday. We hold the power and we should choose instead to use it to honor whatever experiences we had to go through to get to where…