Don't Dwell in the Past, Focus on the Present

A lot can change in a decade. 

Ten years ago, I was married and my life seemed fine. My wife and I were getting along. Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California where we lived. The hit movie was director Christopher Nolan’s Inception, about secret agents who infiltrate other people’s dreams. The hit song was “Airplanes” by B.o.B. People moved about freely in public without masks.

If I could have stepped inside a time machine, punched the coordinates to propel me 10 years forward into 2020, and stepped out to see my life today, I would have been staggered.

I am married. But to a different woman. I am living back in my home state of Kentucky. The hit movie is director Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, about secret agents who travel the globe in time-bending fashion. The hit song is… well, I don’t know because I don’t listen to pop radio that much. We are living in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.

Standing outside my time machine, I might be tempted to sing the lyrics to 2010’s “Airplanes”:

“I could use a dream or a genie or a wish

To go back to a place much simpler than this”

Looking back, life often seems simpler and better in the past.

Like everybody, I had a dream for my life. I would be happy, married, doing what I love. For the most part, I was living it in 2010. Life was good. But it was all about to come crashing down in spectacular fashion.

Just before the year ended, my wife and I split up. A year later, we divorced. I fell into a severe clinical depression. I couldn’t find work for several years. I found myself lost in a wilderness of confusion, disillusionment, and pain. A long decade, punctuated with questions and darkness and difficult self-discovery, lay ahead.

The Bible says: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town, spend a year there doing business, and make a profit—you have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow. You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears. Instead you should say, ‘If the Lord wills it, we shall live to do this or that’” (James 4:13-15).

It seems strange to think about, but even Jesus didn’t know the exact details of the future. 

In Matthew 24:36, when he was talking about his eventual return to Earth after his death, resurrection, and ascension, he said: “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”

Only God knows. And he does not give us time machines. It’s fun to speculate about time travel and how we would go back and alter things if we could see the future. 

God doesn’t give us that power. I believe he gives us something greater. That’s the ability to make good choices now. 

Now is all we have. As Abraham Lincoln said: “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” God doesn’t give us machines so we can bend time and manipulate dreams like people in a Christopher Nolan movie. He gives us free will to make decisions now that can determine the outcome of our lives in the future.

We cannot control everything that will happen to us. I didn’t want to get divorced 10 years ago or suffer an onset of depression. Terrible things happen. But we can choose how we respond to them. Do we become bitter and give up hope? Or do we turn to God for help, make the healthiest decisions we can, and trust him to care for us?

I tried to do that. I didn’t always succeed. I made poor decisions and mistakes. I made good decisions and progress. I hurt people and I blessed people. Nobody gets it all right all the time. 

Life moves forward in fits and starts, setbacks and reboots. But it moves forward in hope if we let it.

Standing here in 2020 looking at the world around me, at the life I have now, I am thankful. I have a wonderful wife. Our relationship is not perfect, it takes work, but it is a blessing. And I’m able to be a better husband because I learned from the mistakes I made in my first marriage. 

Looking back to 10 years ago, I was a different man. Ten years from now, I’ll be different again. Hopefully I’ll be better. 

2 Corinthians 3:18 says: “All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord who is the Spirit.” When we gaze upon the Lord, we grow from glory to glory, strength to strength (Psalm 84:8).

We don’t need to see into the future. And we don’t need to dwell on the past. 

God allows us the gift of now. And he works with us to reach that place where we can say: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us” (Romans 8:18).

There is glory waiting in the future. And there is glory now too. We don’t need a time machine to see it. We just need God, the good Father we have had all along, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).