Sorry for the gross title, but it sucked you into reading, so…….

Proverbs 26:11 says “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” I’ve seen alot of that lately.

Recently we awarded employees significant pay raises—as much as 36%—- and offered them an upward path which they initially accepted, only to have them walk off without even giving notice a couple of months later. They returned to lesser jobs in places of limited opportunity. Why? Mostly because they were comfortable in the lesser place, while the opportunity to live a better life required them to stretch a bit. One commented on how our town of 3000 people was “just to big city” for her.

Really?

But I supposed the kicker for me was when the adopted daughter of a friend of mine reached age 18, got pregnant, graduated high school, and proceeded to go find her birth mother and move back in with the woman who’d abused and abandoned her rather that with the adoptive parents who’d given her everything a kid could want. (Interestingly enough, the community she moved back to was the same one as the employee in the above paragraph.)

The dog returns to its vomit.

In both of these situations, the people involved were shown a path forward to a new life of progress, prosperity, and opportunity; clearly a better life by all measurements. And in both situations they tasted the opportunity, enjoyed it, and then turned back to their old ways. The dog returned to the vomit.

Why?

The answer came blazing into my mind as my friend told about her adopted pregnant daughter. The dog returns to its vomit, because it sees itself as a dog.

When we see ourselves as worthy of better, we turn our backs on the puke of our past. But if we somehow believe we aren’t worthy of anything more than that rancid past, we return to it, eat it, and then wonder why our breath is always bad.

What’s that old saying? “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Is there any chance you keep returning to your vomit, because you’ve never seen yourself as worthy of more?

II Corinthians 5:17 says “If any person is in Christ he is a new creation, the old has passed away and all things have become new.”

You can say goodbye to the past. You don’t have to revisit that failure, or simply that thing that never worked. You can pick up and move forward. All you have to do, is believe what God says “…the old has passed and all thing have become new.”

Don’t eat the puke anymore. You’re better than that.