God specializes in giving back the years you thought you threw away.

Wasted time is the loss people find hardest to forgive themselves for, since there is no way to go back and spend it again. The years of the wrong thing, the stretch you would rather not count, the season that produced nothing you can point to. Those years were not secretly productive. They are simply not the final accounting.

Stop paying interest on those years by treating them as a permanent disqualification. Take what you learned in them, which is usually more than you admit, and start from today’s material. Being behind where you meant to be is a fact about the schedule and not a fact about you.