“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.
