You gotta put your behind in the past...

I'd rather waltz than just walk through the forest.

I was driving to work today and listening to Owl City (as if I ever listen to anything else...). I was desperately trying to think about something to write about on Blog Post Friday. The song: "Plant Life" came on and I decided what to write about. This isn't a funny blog.

The past is a beautiful thing. I've got so many beautiful memories. I've collected them over the years and my trunk is full, full of memories I pull out to look at lovingly when times are bad. But I've been looking at them lately when times aren't bad. I just want to look at them and remember what I've had. I've looked at them so much I'm chained to that trunk. The past has become a pair of beautiful shackles.

There's been a lot of change in my life over the past two and a half years. College ended...I studied fastly and furiously for my finals and then I walked across a stage and it was over. Four years with friends who I lived with and loved dearly and then we moved across the country and nothing will ever be the same. Even when I see them, there are new stories and ours are faded. Though it was a long time ago, it was such an abrupt shock. So I settled here and plugged into life. And then a family that I loved dearly, that was central to my life here was forced to leave abruptly. And all of the things that we did became memories added to my stock and no more can be added. I look at their house and it's a ghost's house, full of pain and memory. All of the pain and memory and change has weighed down my shoulders to the ground.

My friend Joe Walls once wrote: "It is very sad - after all, a part of your life is over and you can't live it over again. But isn't there a little pleasure in the pain of losing chapters of your life? It is tragic, strange, and beautiful all at once. Memory evokes a sense of longing - a longing that is more powerful than the thing or the time or the place we desire. That strong feeling, I think, secretly belongs to a more powerful realm. True, it is partially plain old loss in a world that continually forces change - nobody can reasonably deny the poignancy of it - but that feeling is also a hope and a foretaste of something else."

We cannot live in the past. We can remember it, because it was beautiful. But we cannot live for it. Living in the past, we miss out on the present. And when the present is over it becomes another memory and we never truly live. I am blessed to have life and have it from God and I must live it for Him in the present and I will. He will bring more beautiful things again and He will allow them to pass away again. The greatest treasure is that one day I will see His face in heaven. That joy can never be taken away. In that hope I can live in the present, remembering with fondness the past, and hoping for the future.

"Tonight I'm busting out of this old haunted house, 'cause I'm sick of waiting for all those spiderwebs to grow all around me, 'cause I don't feel dead anymore. I'm not afraid anymore." --Plant Life, Owl City

Philippians 3:13
Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,