Day: June 15, 2012

 “Don’t let your past dictate who you are, but let it be part of who you will become.”

This bit of pre-marital advice from the brother of the bride in the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” holds a great deal of common grace wisdom that can be applied to the Christian life. All of us have pasts, some good, some bad, and most a mixture of both. Despite the church’s frequent out of context reading of Paul’s admonition to “forget what lies behind” (one expressly related to rejecting the works-righteousness of his Pharisee days) we have no choice but to grapple with our past. Those who think they can forget it often find themselves being unconsciously and negatively defined by it for the rest of their lives.

Where we do have a choice is in how we deal with our past. I believe there is a biblically-congruent and divinely-blessed way of resolving even the worst aspects of our personal history, especially those aspects that have caused us continued pain and have stymied our spiritual growth. This is found in purposely remembering, purposely grieving and purposely forgiving, all with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Our Lord calls us to childlike trust if we want to grow in the grace and knowledge of Him. But for all too many of us our childhoods were problematic at best and nightmarish at worst and the coping mechanisms we adopted to help us survive have robbed us of the very childlikeness we desperately need to truly follow our Lord and experience the abundant life He promises His children. We became hardened, cynical and bitter and we limited our range of emotion to survive. Distrust of anyone but ourselves was often the result.

I wish I could say that such aspects of our pre-Christian character are miraculously and completely removed from us at the time of our conversion. Perhaps for a few people God does perform such a miracle, but I’ve yet to meet someone who appears to have been genuinely delivered in such an immediate and permanent way. For most of us salvation grants us the power we need to begin to change and heal and then, with Christ’s help, we must spend the rest of our earthly lives consciously and progressively working out this aspect of our sanctification.

Let me make a bold statement: the best parts of childhood, even prior to Christian conversion, need to be set free in our memory to be cherished and relived, not forgotten. By this I mean that whatever went wrong in our distant past must not be allowed to rob us of whatever good memories we can recover and re-integrate into our adult lives today. The seemingly innate closeness to God, the innocence, the vividness and sublimity of life as children, all these things can and should be allowed to be a part of who we are now.

Our deep past re-integrated into our present lives can be a sacred and God-ordained part of our future.

How do we do this? How do we recapture the joy of our childhood when concurrent or subsequent events seemed to kill the entirety of what we once happily knew and took for granted? The answer involves a very intentional journey into a place that might seem like the very opposite of our goal, the place of deeply expressed grief.

Grieving our past is, when bathed in prayer and submitted to God, a pathway to healing and restoration. Despite those stoic believers who tell you to just “trust Jesus and move on” (whatever that means) deep and even long periods of intentional grief over our very real losses in life is part of God’s prescription for granting us abundant life even here on Earth. Our Lord wept over Lazarus and Jerusalem. He is described as “a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief.” If we take these and other verses at face value, and I believe we should, we can be assured that our Lord’s humanity included many tears shed during his 33 years in the world.

If this is true we are in no way sinning when we sit down with photographs or our childhood, put on some emotionally moving music, stare at those pictures of a time seemingly lost forever…and cry our eyes out. This is especially true when we begin the process by praying that Jesus will draw near to us, stay with us through those tears and use them to achieve his perfectly loving will for our lives.

Over time these periods of intentional grieving can cleanse us from all kinds of spiritual and emotional garbage from our past, garbage that continues to hold us down and hold us back from the abundant adult life God always intended for us.

A huge part of that cleansing comes from a beautiful byproduct of God-ordained and directed grieving, true forgiveness towards those who robbed us of our childhood joy so long ago. As we work through anger to sadness and emotional catharsis we may find ourselves remembering those who hurt us, often those we loved most, and beginning to see them in a new light. While we may not forget what they did to us we also remember how much we loved them (or even wanted to love them) and as we weep a strange and often unexpected thing happens; our hearts soften towards them. This is because grief can run even deeper in us than anger, if we let it, and it is anger that ultimately keeps us locked in un-forgiveness.

As we intentionally grieve the good part of our past is somehow restored to us in our memory, never to be lost to us again the way it once was. Beyond that the childlike trust of childhood begins to flow, if only slowly, back into our consciousness and we become more able to find the faith we need to follow Jesus Christ in a profoundly deeper way.

This kind of “soul-work” is sometimes hard. It is not easy to remember something precious that was taken from us, especially during the initial phases of grief, and we do well to enter the process slowly and with a great deal of prayer. It is also important to remember that real change comes over time, as Shakespeare wrote “what wound did ever heal but by degrees?”

Yes, it is hard, but what we achieve through the process of intentional grieving ultimately becomes a precious and irreplaceable part of our sanctification. It is something we will never regret doing, either in this life or the next.