A Trip Down Memory Lane - Pt 1

I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds. Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God? You are the God who works wonders; you have made known your might among the peoples. (Psalm 77:11-14 ESV).

Old picture albums can be both wonderful and terrible. As I mentioned yesterday, I have been more nostalgic than usual lately. My frequent trips down “memory lane” have given me a wide range of emotions. Of course there has been a recall of spectacular experiences. However, there has also been a renewed sense of the failures along that path also. Memory Lane is like that. The psalmist in our reading today encourages us to remember “the wonders of old” (v. 11). My experience with memories is that I can’t merely restrict my path through the past to just the “wonders”; I also easily recall the pain and trial of the path of my life. So, I began to do some work in achieving a balance with nostalgia. It is possible to sin against God and hurt our soul by failing to remember the past and by remembering it in the wrong way. In other words, you could blow it both ways. You can wreck your life by neglecting the past and you neglect your life by an excessive living in the past. The word nostalgia may point to something innocent and healthy or something excessive and unhealthy. It would be unhealthy, however, if you thought about those past experiences continually and felt burdened by the fact that they are never going to come again. That becomes a kind of paralyzing regret that it is all over and the best days are in the past. That starts to be unhealthy. So what we need, I think, is a theology of the past. The past is not for fueling and paralyzing regret and disappointment. The past is not meant for fueling anger and grudges. A lot of people use the past for regret and use the past for disappointment and use the past for grudges and use the past for anger. Those are all misuses of the past. That is not what the past is for. God didn’t give us the past to make us regretful and to paralyze us with disappointment or rage or grudge. There are positive uses of the past that God does ordain. There are at least four that I can think of: gratitude, repentance, faith, and knowledge or wisdom. We’ll look at each of these in the coming days. However, for today, might I encourage you to simply pray that the Lord will grant you a peace about both the past and the future? Adopt the truth that past failures and future fears must not rob you of present joy.