Pastor’s Pondering
July 4, 2010
Are you at peace with your past? On our journey to spiritual health we accumulate a lot of emotional baggage. The past tends to leave us with an assortment of mistakes, mistreatments, and missed opportunities. The related accumulation of guilt, resentment, and fear can become a burden too heavy to carry at times. We live under an umbrella of “oughts.” All the things we think we ought to have done and ought to be doing are constantly raining down on us. We come from imperfect backgrounds which have contributed to our personal perplexities. Most of us have a lot to live up to and a lot to live down. Whatever our past has been, although it does not have to restrain us, it does affect us. We have to make adjustments because yesterday’s ledger affects today’s balance sheet. Our past is like a boomerang— we cannot completely throw it away- it keeps coming back to influence our daily decisions.
What happens when some of your pain in looking back is connected to the church, connected to people we continue to see daily? After we have followed the Scriptural prescriptions, like Matthew 18:15-17, honest integrity is our greatest ally. Sometimes memory can play tricks on us and we can read more into a past occurrence than the truth can support. Memory can be exaggerated or minimized, whichever serves us best at the moment. As best as we can, we need to let the past be the past and treat it with truth and grace. The pain of looking back occurs when there is an unwillingness to forgive and stop regurgitating ugliness. In making peace with the past, not only do we forgive others, we forgive ourselves. We learn to let bygones be bygones as we move redemptively through the present into the future. Paul said it this way, “But one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:14 We cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope issues that frighten us go away. Our past can be resolved, but it is a work of grace, a spiritual experience, which often requires repentance and faith. It may also mean leaving your neighbor’s dirty laundry where it belongs-in their basket.