THE SOUR GRAPES MYTH

“I thank my God every time I remember you.”  Philippians 1:3

           

 I get the feeling when I read this verse that Paul enjoyed remembering these Christian friends in Philippi. He seemed to think of them with deep longing but still to be able to rest in the comfort of his memories. He didn’t seem in any way haunted or saddened by remembering them, even though he was writing this letter from prison in faraway Rome and had no guarantee that he would ever see them again to take up making more memories with these he loved so well.

            But this isn’t the way remembering goes always.  Some people hate remembering.

Are you in a season of life when, because of a leanness of finances or health, you can’t do some of the things you used to do?  Maybe you’ve lived a life of traveling here and there, seeing new places and experiencing a periodic freshness of vision that so often comes with vacating the norm and heading out for places unknown.  Maybe you cherish a history of hiking, mountain climbing, running marathons; perhaps your bookshelves are full of photo albums testifying to grand adventures and exotic experiences that you can, for one reason or another, no longer afford.  Even worse, maybe you have reached a place where you must realize that more adventures like these are not just up ahead around some foreseeable bend, but must truly now be tucked away and entrusted  into the arms of memory.

            Although we might at first feel discouraged, sad, even depressed at such a realization, I am beginning to understand that there is another way to approach such a seemingly sad situation with a certain kind of joy.  In fact, I am inclined to identify this kind of camouflaged joy as what Nehemiah meant by “the joy of the Lord.”

            There are two ways to approach those photo albums of times gone by. 

Our Enemy wants us to choose to leave them on the shelf and assign them to the dust.  He wants us to dread seeing evidence of “better” days and brighter moments, since now we are on this other side, looking at life in its plain, vanilla dullness with no chocolate anywhere on the horizon.  A dramatized, Hollywood version of what is happening to us might filter in tragic tones of doom and color the landscape in the somberness of dull, parched hues: a life that’s reached a dead-end road, a heart that is consigned to the pitiful existence of the haunting memories of beautiful fulfillment, eyes that strain for bygone inspiration that is getting smaller and smaller on the horizon.  This is the attitude that if I can’t still have it, it’s just too sad to think about.  Remembering only rips open the wounds. 

But there is another way to think about where we are now in relation to where we used to be.  If we think that the only good of all those sweet times came when they were actually happening, then of course we will bemoan having lost them.  But if we consider that such an idea is a lie of the devil, we might be able to open our minds to a different, clearer, truer way of thinking. 

It is true that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, (although that axiom has always made better sense to me when you turn it around and say, “You can’t eat your cake and have it too” because right up until the time you eat the cake, you actually do still have it!) This might very well be true for cakes, but what we’re talking about here is not cake.  Memories are not digestible things that go into our systems on one end and get spat out of the other end, like cake.  The places we have been, the wonders we have seen, the adventures we have experienced entered into our lives and stayed!  We didn’t just go there, do that, and then lose it all when we left.

God’s truth, as opposed to the devil’s lie, is that the highlights of our lives are not experiences that came and went.  We have no reason to mourn their loss. In a very real sense, the best of those times is yet to come.

 Just as age ferments wine into its prime, so does God use our past to enrich our future. We don’t have to let our sweet memories ferment into sour grapes.