Reflections on the Past

With Homecoming being this past week and all, I've been thinking about the past quite a bit. The past is intriguing to me. Understanding history or learning from the past - mistakes and successes - is an act of reflection that is well worth the time. It is from our past that we learn and move ahead. Knowing where we've been allows us to know where we are going.

What’s interesting about the past, though, is how paralyzing it can be. The past can be haunting, no? We can be haunted by our failures or of the failures who have gone on before us. Looking back at choices I have made in the past that I'm not proud of can be crippling to me and put me into a state of despair. I'm sure many of you have made choices that you have made in the past that you wish you had not and in moments of weakness, you remember these things and it drags you down.

But have you ever considered that we can also be haunted by our past successes as well? We look back at how well something turned out for us in the past and we long for that feeling again. We can walk around humming Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days" because that's where we want to live - in the past, because the past is safe because it is only a memory. We end up haunted by those things that used to be so great and we fail to see that there are many more successes (and failures) ahead of us as we live life to the fullest.

What we need is a healthy dose of forgetfulness - that we would learn to forget those times where we failed and to forget those times when we succeeded. Then we will be able to live lives that reflect the words of Paul in Philippians 3, "But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." If we are clinging on to the past in our lives - whether it be our failures or successes - we will never be able to fully "press on toward the goal" that God has called us to.