Looking backwards, forward or where?

One of the greatest ways to spoil a journey is to keep thinking of what you should have done in the past instead of enjoying where you are now. When you are viewing the Colosseum in Rome can you really be spending your time thinking instead of how you should have tried a different cafe the day before? Why regret the past to the effect of losing out on the present.

How many times do we do this in our life journey? How many times do we wish we could replay the past? How much better our lives would have been if I had gone done the one path instead of the one we traveled on. Why do that? We can't change our pasts. Even worse what would we lose in our present if we could change the decisions of the past. If I had done things differently in the past I might not have been living in Newport wanting to be on a couples bowling league the same time Edna was and I never would have met her. Would the change in my life be worth never meeting her and having her say yes to being my wife? Would the change in my life be worth never having our son Andrew that we have now?

Instead of regretting the past we need to enjoy the benefits the past has given us today. The decisions we did make have brought us to where we are now and give us the gifts we now have.

Even more important we need to look up and realize that our God is a sovereign God. His ways and thoughts are not our ways and thoughts. He has a plan for our lives that will bring Him glory. He desires and plans to use our past, our present, and our future to bring glory to His name. Regretting our past and where it has brought us is telling God that He was wrong and He should have given us control of our lives. Regretting our pasts prevents us from seeing His fingerprints in our past and bring us to Him with hearts of praise and thanksgiving.

Looking backwards blind us to our present spot in our journey. Worrying about the future crowds out what the present has to hold. Looking upwards helps us see the glory of God in our present and helps us see Him in our journey and we can let His light shine through us.

Here I start

How many times we refer to our lives as a journey? The truth is if we look at our life as a journey we can better understand our life. Each journey is different and so is each life. They both start at a certain point and time. Through out each there are choices to make. Once you make the decisions you cannot change them, but they do determine where the next steps will head. There is so much we can gain out of both if we are willing to take the effort to grasp of what it has to offer.
The trick is to learn what our journey says about us, both the good and the bad. We need to study our journey to understand more about us. We also need to determine where our guidance will come from to determine where we go. We choose the wrong guidance and the trip turns out bad, but get the right guide and the trip is the best there is.
Travel with me as I examine my journeys to learn more about myself. Also think about your own journey to learn about yourself as well. Let us look at our journeys together and grow with what we gain through our times.