Is your past important ?
Does it have a role to play in the meaning and purpose of your life?
I assume there are many moments that you are proud of, would want to recreate, remember with affection, hark back to.
Inversely the same for moments that you'd rather forget, are remorseful, ashamed of, need forgiveness?
No?
Yes?
Do you regret ? For missed opportunities or in need of forgiveness?
If the past is important, is the future just as much?
Why?
There is nothing that can be done to undone, so why bother?
The future has yet to happen, so why worry? After all it's just an illusionary neurological physical state that you have no control over? Like this conversation?
Yet we have an innate sense of time.
Yet we have an innate sense of morality.
Yet we have an innate sense of seeking purpose, meaning, coherence, justice, mercy, truth.
We know injustice when we see it, we are perplexed or outraged when injustice occurs.
When a crime is found gone unpunished for decades and then finally brought to justice....
Why?
The past matters when seen through the prism of time, morality, truth, justice and the knowledge that we have a finite time.
Does it matter if justice is served now or a 1,000 years from now?
You often hear of an inmate saying he or she is "serving time". Time being the currency.
A well respected 20th century philosopher Albert Camus once said that "death"was philosophy's only problem.
Could it be that the this thing called time alerts us to the immediacy of our futility and haplessness. We can't delay it, slow it.
We can't run from our past.
Yet in a world ingrained with a morality, a justice and penal system, time is inextricably married to it.
Malcolm Muggeridge a journalist who experienced two world wars, the rise and fall of Russia and lived in India and was a latecomer to Christ, said this of his past:
"Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful, with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo … the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross [of Christ] signifies, and it is the cross more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ."
In Romans 12: 17-19 it says: Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”
Hebrews 9: 27-28:
Everyone has to die once, then face the consequences. Christ’s death was also a one-time event, but it was a sacrifice that took care of sins forever. And so, when he next appears, the outcome for those eager to greet him is, precisely, salvation.
1 Corithians 11: 25-26
“In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.…”
(There is a proclamation of the past, in the present, and looking to the hope of the future, wrapped up in this one re-enactment of Holy Communion)
Ecclesiastes 3:11
"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end."
(While we know the past, the present and future, we have delude ourselves of our impending demise, yet hope for an eternity)
Could it be that God has structured the world in such a way that He's trying to get our attention in the most profound and loudest, consistent and persistent way?
Could it be that God has structured life that our past makes us who we are and that despite our protestations we wouldn't change it because we would not be who we are today?
Could it be that God is giving you and me the maximum opportunity to make decisions about life and relationship with Him and others ?
"We look back upon history and what do we see?
Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”
In one lifetime I have seen my own countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”
I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.
I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.
All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.
England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.
Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.
Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.
America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.
Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life."
—Malcom Muggeridge, “But Not of Christ,” Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, ed. Cecil Kuhne (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 29-30.
