God is in the business of newness. Many times life without evidence of newness is like a desert. There is nothing wrong with retrospect, but when it becomes a habit, just like anything that's overdone, a long litany of looking back becomes a distinct handicap. We become frozen in time. We become fearful. We carry the past with us like a great weight of luggage travelling along wherever we go. We become burdened...and perhaps become burdensome to others.
When we are forever viewing today and tomorrow and yesterday, through the shadowy or murky lens of the past, we can easily end up with a permanent crick in our necks, a pain that won't go away. Instead of being the salt of the earth and adding savour to life, we become like a pillar of salt in the wilderness with no usefulness, as took place with Lot's wife who insisted on looking back. God wants us to look forward. He is all about pressing on and beyond. He is all about newness.
One of the greatest dangers of being stuck looking back or living in the past, or hauling the past into the present is that we stop living. We're living but we live with baggage, like stubbornness and bitterness and blame. Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back on the evil place God had delivered her and her family from --- Sodom and Gomorrah. What was there to look back on? Why did she do it? Perhaps she bemoaned the loss of a place she had known for years that was familiar, even though it was such an evil zone, God had to remove it from the face of the earth.
Looking back, staying stuck in the past is not God's way. God wants His best, His 'more', His 'overflow', His 'now' to be our daily starting place. God wants us refreshed. He desires us to be growing and moving on. God is a God of deliverance. God is a God who makes all things new.
"Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old...Don't you see? Even now I am doing a new thing. Even now it springs to life! I will make a new way in the wilderness and springs in the desert." Isaiah 43:18-19 (paraphrased)
p.s. I'm not writing the next couple of days...some new things to do! Look forward to catching up with you later! Susan :)
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