Understanding the past...

For my Parents silver wedding anniversary I have been unearthing photos in albums tracking their 25 years of marriage- (check out the Tea House for more on this...) - which has been quite an exercise. If you aren't one for indulging in enormous amounts of nostalgia I definitely don't recommend doing this- especially not routing through about twenty different, and dusty, photograph albums. As I rummaged, I moved through the 1990's to the 2000's, watching as years were added to my parents faces and my chubby limbs became long and lanky ones. I saw the arrival of a puppy and became an onlooker as he turned into an old, stinky dog. I saw the houses around our family change, becoming witness to moments of hilarity and tears that have otherwise been forgotten. I felt like I was picking apart an old, old brain, where all this information had been stored away in darkness for years.

It made me wish for the past. Made my inner child dance around inside of me. The cuts on my knees as I went in to do ballet, the harry-potter books I read in the bath, the bouncy-castle we got for that one birthday, the bridge I jumped off into summery rivers. It took me back I can tell you.

I know that you don't pull out the camera in the awful ugly moments; when you drop that harry potter book in the bath for the umpteenth time, or cry because all the boys are on the bouncy castle. So I know that this is definitely a one-sided look at my childhood, but I want to question whether or not having 'rose tinted glasses' is necessarily a bad thing. Can't we just celebrate all the good times that we had? The bad times shaped us, made us who we are most likely, but so does remembering and indulging in all the fun and laughter we enjoyed way back then. Don't you think?

No, not always. I feel like God gave me this task so that I might remember how it was. And remembering how it was, helps you understand the way things are. It's so important to have a grasp of the past to look clearly at the present; how otherwise would I understand my parents? Or even friends? Isn't that true with everything in life? Take the Bible, for example: it is crucial we look at the past in the Old Testament, the way we mucked up and rejected everything God is- to fully understand the AMAZING vastness of his grace in forgiving that, and choosing to die for us anyway. Gospel truth. Understanding the past...helps us appreciate our present and grasp our future. We can just smile at what used to make us smile, we can blithely ignore the dark bits if we want- but I want to suggest that this leaves us lesser people. We are more if we take our past, all of it, not just the bright and sunny photos, but all of it, and use it to understand the present, and let that form us as we should be. Whole. As God intended.