Minding Our Tenses Well: Day 3

I have considered the days of old, the years of long ago.

Psalm 77:5

The past can teach us, nurture us, but it cannot sustain us. The essence of life is change and we must move ever forward or the soul will wither and die. S. Kearsley

The Past Tense

Unless I am some sort of an actuarial miracle, I have more days in my past than in my future. If you have lived past your mid-50’s, that is also true for you. This possibly sobering fact isn’t something most people think about much. Thanks to modern medicine and our youth-centered culture (“60 is the new 40”!), we keep perking on into our sixties or more before we do that math. When we do, we will come to the reality that, not only are our best days behind us, but that the majority of our days are as well. It is then, when life slows us down, that we will often reach back into our earlier years to evaluate how we have done.

To one degree or another, we all carry our past—good, bad and indifferent-- with us. The ability to reflect on and learn from what has gone before is part of our unique likeness to God as His image-bearers. Our years on earth are meant to teach us, season us and make us wiser. The good old-fashioned Bible word for that process is sanctification. The only mistake we can make is to misunderstand that God intends for that process to continue until we draw our last breath. We may have raised our family or retired from our career, but, as God has planned it, we will never retire from the process of sanctification.

There are three ways to look back at the past: with gratitude, with regret or a combination of the two—which is the best choice. We can all look back to poor decisions we made when we were younger. But when we do, we must complete the picture and place those choices in the framework of who we were at the time. Doing that isn’t meant to excuse our past failures; it should help us see how far, by God’s grace, we have come. Through the power of the cross and the Spirit’s sanctifying work in our lives, we will realize that we have become different people. And it has happened one day at a time.

We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.  R. Warren

Nancy Shirah