Retrospection

My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?” These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival. Psalm 42:3-4 ESV

            “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…” Back is often a nice direction to look. The past is clearer, but also tinted in shade of gold and rose. Retrospection can be a dangerous practice because, even the worst parts of it, often appear to keep getting brighter in our minds. We can become like Israel wondering in the wilderness, bound for a promised land, but longing more for the land of slavery and toil. We might be as Lot’s wife looking back on ruin and receiving ruination for our error. We can be deceived into longing for evil things that were simply because they are now known.

            Maybe that season that beckons us back was truly good, perhaps even the best of all the seasons we have known. Maybe we go there as our shelter. It is a false shelter. Indeed, it is more a means of suicide to lead such an illusion of life than a means of coping with real life. We cannot live again in the past; we already lived there and cannot share the space with ourselves. It is an easy way to die. The psalmist may seem to go that way, but he has learned a greater truth.

            When we hurt it is easy to run back the way we came, towards that place we were before the pain set in. The greater our hurt the greater the temptation. You should look back; you should even go back in memory and watch again with greater knowledge what was. Not as the object of desire in itself, not as the shelter from the storm; but as proof of the hope you have going forward as you must.

            The greater truth is that God does not change. This gives wonderful redemptive value to our story thus far written in our memories by the grace of God. We may look upon a happier time and know that the God who blessed us then is still here now. We may look upon our darkest night and see that God did not leave us even then. We may survey all that has come before in our little tales and find that God has been at work. If we are honest in recollection, we should even find that His hand was hidden to us in the seasons past as we lived them as it is to us now. We ought always to find that we are progressing.

            When we look backwards, we ought to look up, and we ought to look in more than we look around. Retrospection is not a refuge in our storm, it is a picture that reveals that refuge. We look back to see our God when we cannot seem to find in the moment. What was, what is, what shall be all is ever about Christ our King. That the past is only a place to visit if god is there. A place where God is not is no place to be.

Prayer

            Father let us not despise what You provide us today even if our food be our own tears. Let us recall what You have taught us in the days gone by, in them and through them. Let us learn and grow and go on towards Home. Let yesterday be not our hope, but just another book that tells us of that hope. Let us use memory as the good gift it was meant to be, and not as a substitute for you. Lord continue what you have begun until it is finished in each of us. And to You alone be the glory of all our days. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Song

O God our help in ages past

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