Like Sands Through The Hourglass

Please forgive my absence for a couple of months. Many of my thoughts have been hard to hold on to, and many of my musings have been unrepeatable in polite society. (Polite society – isn’t that an oxymoron, or is society itself moronic? You get the picture!)

I come back to this forum because of an anniversary of sorts I had last week. 1/16/2008, when I was diagnosed with Colorectal Cancer. The cancer was removed surgically on February 20^th of that year, making me now a 10 year survivor. It’s not an anniversary of my own making. I’ve known some survivors who have been around much longer, and some who have passed in much less time. My continuing on is by God’s grace. (Let me just say, however, Cancer is an evil that falls on the just and unjust. That some have passed is not due to God “cursing” them.)

Why do we place such emphasis on dates in time? Anniversaries, births, deaths, we all have a place to store those dates that mean the most to us. First off, we recognize that we do live in the confines of time, and of that only in the present. Maybe marking the passage of an occurrence in the past, and remembering it at intervals, allows us to feel as if we can hold on to the past, even if only a fleeting moment.

Or is it because we want to recall the emotion associated with that event? (Joy, Shame, Anger, etc.) The event being important enough to need to retain whatever emotion it created. Or maybe it’s simply a need to just remember. To validate who we are by holding claim to those things that made us. For me, I think this last one has the most meaning. 2008 was quite eventful for me: cancer, surgery, ostomy, an introduction to an obnoxiously loud device called a wound-vac, the equally obnoxious tacidurn tape, ostomy reversal, dealing with work/health issues related to all that, getting ordained, losing my dad, and any number of smaller things in between. Lots of marked out dates on the calendar.

So we all have these stone carved historical markers in our lives. It becomes important then how we use them. If we try to hold on to them, without looking forward? We grasp for a past that is no longer in our reach, and the stones become a wall to hold us in and all others out. We cannot enjoy the present (our place in time) because we do not live there, and the wall prevents us from going through.

If we use the past as a foundation to move forward? Then the stones become a road, laid out one stone at a time, and each step forward becomes possible because of each step before. Always moving forward, because if we stop, the present becomes the past, and the stones again become a wall.

A verse to help: Philippians 3:13-14. “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind, and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” The goal is always ahead, just as we must always grow. If you don’t seem to be moving, there are two possibilities: either God is wanting you to rest (which in Him is also growth) or you’ve got a stone in the way that needs to be repurposed from a wall to a road. The choice is yours.