Tuesday, February 15, 2011

February 15 In Proper Retrospect

Deuteronomy 4:9 Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live.

Funny how God works; yesterday I wrote an article, really more of an essay about how our past influences both our present and who we are in our present. As I thought about what influenced me from my childhood, it was easy to remember what I will call the good results from childhood influences.

I grew up in the country - a reader because after I had outgrown the joy of exploring, what else is there to do. A dozen library books a week in the summer was about the quota. And I learned to see the mountains, the wilder the better, as a place of restoration from the busyness and noise of life.

God ordered my life so that Independent Baptist Church of Towanda became my spiritual home as a child, and it only occurred to me as I typed that line, that God did that. My parents didn't go there. In fact, after my older sister moved away, I had to persuade my dad to take me, and he thought Sunday morning was plenty of church for anyone. God's Spirit evidenced his presence in my life in the form of an appetite for spiritual things - to read and memorize the Word and to connect as much to church and the things of faith as an outsider kid can.

We moved to State College in Pennsylvania for my husband to go to the University there, and Calvary Baptist Church sent us an invitation to their services. I filed it away in a desk drawer because right then, finding a church was not high on our to-do list. But my sister, who never missed church, came for a visit, and we had to find a place...and we went to Calvary. We never missed a service after that Sunday morning becoming invested in the ministry, so much so that my husband finally consented to preach at a tiny church plant in a nearby town.

He preached on Matthew 16:26, what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lost his own soul, and the course of our life changed - from engineering to education, Bible education, from having it all to having enough, from security in what we could do to security in what God could do.

Have there been regrets along the way? Oh yes. And lots of pain. Smith says "A healthy heart knows what to remember and what to let slip away." As I reflect on the regrets, I know those regrets could be paralyzing, plunging me into immobility. But I ask God today to help me remember which memories to rehearse and which ones to learn from and move on.

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