"...nostalgia is how God sees all the time... "

“I can have nostalgia for almost anything. That’s how it works. It makes the events of your past integral in your present, as I’m sure they are. 

Nostalgia is how God sees all the time.”

          -Jedidiah Jenkins, Like Streams to the Ocean, Notes on Ego, Love, And the Things That Make Us Who We Are

the-dangers-of-nostalgia

"It would be unhealthy, however — this thing called nostalgia — if you thought about those past experiences continually and felt burdened by the fact that they are never going to come again: a kind of paralyzing regret that it is all over and the best days are in the past. There is no future like it. That starts to be unhealthy. So what we need, I think, is a biblical vision. Or you might even call it a theology of the past.

The past is not for fueling and paralyzing regret and disappointment. The past is not meant for fueling anger and grudges. A lot of people use the past for regret, and use the past for disappointment, and use the past for grudges, and use the past for anger. Those are all misuses of the past. That is not what the past is for. God didn’t give us the past to make us regretful and to paralyze us with disappointment or rage or grudge. 

There are positive uses of the past that he did ordain, and let me just mention four: gratitude, repentance, faith, and knowledge or wisdom." - John Piper

Gratitude for God’s Past Grace

Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,

     for his wondrous works to the children of man! (Psalm 107:8)

I will remember the deeds of the Lord;

     yes, I will remember your wonders of old. (Psalm 77:11)

Remember the wondrous works that he has done,

     his miracles and the judgments he uttered. (1 Chronicles 16:12)

In other words, history is an ever-growing reservoir of past grace where the thankfulness of our hearts can drink and drink with continual pleasure. That is what it is for: the drinking of thankfulness. And when I say past, I mean anywhere from five seconds ago to five thousand years ago; it is all past.

Remember for Repentance

The past is a source of healthy repentance.

Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. (Ephesians 2:12)

Isn’t it amazing that he told us to remember that? I just think that is amazing. Don’t we want to forget that? No, we don’t want to forget that because, if we forget from what we were saved, our sense of repentance will be shallow, and our enjoyment of grace will be thin.

So it was a healthy remembering that Paul was calling the Ephesians to do for the sake of a healthy repenting. He said in 2 Corinthians 7:10:

Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

In other words, there is way to think about your past that leads to repentance, leads to salvation, leads to life, leads to joy, through and beyond regret, and there is a worldly way to think about the past that paralyzes you and brings death.

Faith for the Future

Third, the past is a source of faith for the future. My favorite verse, perhaps, in all the Bible is Romans 8:32:

He who did not [past tense] spare his own Son but gave [past tense] him up for us all, how will [future tense] he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Oh, I love the logic of that verse. Because of our focus on the past — namely, God’s willingness in history to give his Son — therefore, faith is undaunted for the reception of all these promises in the future. The past serves the future by feeding faith because of all the faithful works of God to make a future for us in the past.

Israel failed precisely to do this, and that is why they were undone in the wilderness. Psalm 106:7:

Our fathers, when they were in Egypt,

     did not consider your wondrous works;

they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love,

     but rebelled by the sea, at the Red Sea.

Why did they rebel? They didn’t remember. They didn’t remember, so they didn’t have faith to walk with Moses through the sea the way they should have. And they grumbled on the other side. All of it was rooted in forgetting past grace. So they didn’t trust him for future grace because they didn’t remember past grace.

Wisdom from Before

This is kind of a theology of past. That is my understanding of what I am doing here. It is giving a little mini theology of the past. The past is a great reservoir of knowledge and wisdom. Where else can we learn anything except from the past? The future has not happened yet. We can’t learn anything from what hasn’t happened yet.

The present is ephemeral; I mean, try to learn something from the present; try to focus on the present. As soon as you have got the present focused, it is the past. Every millisecond is flowing over the waterfall of the present and turning into a past reservoir just as soon as you see it go over the waterfall. As soon as you focus on a moment, it has become a past moment. The only thing we can focus on that has any stability at all are the products of the past. All books are from the past. All videos are from the past. All recordings are from the past. And this sentence that I just quoted — all recordings are from the past — is now past. All the means of stored knowledge and wisdom are from the past. It is the only place we have to go to learn anything or to grow in knowledge or in wisdom.

So for the Christian, that means mainly the Bible, which was, like all other books, written in the past. So for the Christian, let it be said: the best is always yet to come. And I really mean it. I mean: for eternity, starting right now, the best is always yet to come for the Christian. So the future is massively important. We are people of hope, and therefore we do not live in the past. We draw thankfulness from the past. We draw life giving repentance from the past. We feed our faith and hope on the faithfulness of God in the past, and we learn everything we know and get all the wisdom we have from the past. But all of it is for the sake of this afternoon’s joy and this afternoon’s faith and this afternoon’s obedience and the joy of all eternity."  -John Piper 

"...there is nowhere to go but to God..."

pc  matt and cyndi

“But in Heaven there shall be no interruption, no weeping eyes shall make us for a moment pause in our vision, no earthly joys, no sensual delights, shall create a discord in our melody. There shall we have no fields to till, no garments to spin, no wearied limbs, no dark distresses, no burning thirsts, no pangs of hunger, no weeping of bereavement. We shall have nothing to do or think upon but forever to gaze upon that Sun of Righteousness with eyes that cannot be blinded and with a heart that can never be weary.”      (CHS, Sermon 188  The Redeemers Prayer)

"Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given to Me

 [as Your gift to Me], may be with Me where I am, 

so that they may see My glory which You have given Me,

 because You loved Me before the foundation of the world."

John 17:24 (AMP)

                        

The Shape of Things

by JASON DYBA

( Excerpts)    

for these 2 hours,
I could just surrender the impossibility 
of trying to recognize and categorize every worry in the world—
as we grow and gray, we realize:
they are the shape that they are. 

and when we had laughed sufficiently,

almost painfully,

I looked again at the great tree— 

its branches reaching to Heaven, peering over the rooftops 

—and I imagined it

having watched a thousand children play

having stood through a thousand storms. 

I thought of Big Don, smiling on the sidewalk

and my son, 

tapping the earth and listening for its sound. 

neither the young nor the old 

are worried about tomorrow. 

they are not imploring God to adjust His timeline

so that something might pass or bloom before its time. 

it may not be that they are wise or patient, 

but rather, planted. dependent.

there is nowhere to go but to God. 

nowhere we can go beyond His gaze. 

He understands the place where we are, 

the pressures of it all—

and He longs to meet with us

in the million shades of midnight. 

for each regret, there is a perfect grace

uniquely spoken 

a comfort that will carry us to tomorrow. 

we need not be anxious

for He knows our every sorrow. 

He knows

they are the shape that they are. 

"Hope Gap...perseverance."

Say not the Struggle nought Availeth

BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH


Say not the Struggle nought Availeth read aloud

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been they remain.


If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

And, but for you, possess the field.


For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.


And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.

"...Northeasters bear down on the best of us..."

 

"Northeasters bear down on the best of us. Contrary winds.
Crashing waves. They come. 

But Jesus still catches his children. He still extends his arms. 

He still sends his angels. Because you belong to him, you can have peace in the midst of the storm. The same Jesus who sent the angel to Paul sends this message to you:

"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you" (Isaiah 43:2)

- Max Lucado , anxious for nothing, Finding Calm in a Chaotic World

"Northeasters bear down on the best of us. Contrary winds. 

Crashing waves. They come. 

But Jesus still catches his children. He still extends his arms. 

He still sends his angels. 

Because you belong to him, you can have peace in the midst of the storm. The same Jesus who sent the angel to Paul sends this message to you:

"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you" (Isiah 43:2)