The Best Is Yet To Come
I left home when I was 19. Since then I have lived in several States and even moved to a whole other country. In the time that I have been gone I have changed and so has my home town. Whenever I go home I get a rush of nostalgia. I remember all that was. The good times and the bad times.
I cannot explain the conflict inside me when I go back home and it is not what I expected. I always expect something else. I expect what I was used too. But what I am familiar with has passed, it is over, it is done. And somehow I always expect the past to be waiting for me when I get home.
I find myself constantly doing this. Not only with my home town, but with everything. Oh you know, "the good 'ol days" when so and so and such and such a thing was better. The other day I was watching Criminal Minds and at the the end of the episode Hotch quoted John Irving, "Your memory is a monster. It summons with a will of its own. You think you have a memory but it has you." A memory can taste so sweet and it can be so bitter. We can get trapped in the past, forget the present and miss out on the future. I have learned that the past is not meant to be re-lived or reduplicated, but rather, to be celebrated. We celebrate where we have been because we have confidence that God is constantly doing new things (2 Cor 5:17, Rev 21:5). New things in our churches, schools, organizations, communities, families, friends, and cities. But most importantly in our relationship with Him. Things do not have to look the way they used too, and they usually don't when God recreates them. The formless void did not look the same at the end of the Seventh day in creation and neither does your life, or relationship with God, need to look the same now as it did at some time in the past. God does not change, but we change and that is why he is constantly making things new. That is why one moment in your life does not last forever; because the best things God has to give us are always yet to come. For it is written, "Do not say, 'why were the former days better than these?' For you do not inquire wisely concerning this." (Ecc 7:10)
The best is yet to come.
