Article
Carrying Your Past Into Christmastime
What does the Lord have for our pasts that we carry with us like heavy weights into Christmastime and the new year?
If you’re like me (or … nothing at all like me), you have still probably seen a gazillion film or stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. One of the beautiful features of Dickens’ story is that it is incredibly rich with Biblical symbolism. Ebeneezer Scrooge is an unregenerate old sinner who has allowed greed, bitterness, and regret to characterize his life before he has a Damascene-like conversion on Christmas Eve. As Scrooge’s memories are jogged by three ghosts who haunt him past the midnight hour, you begin to see the sad and complicated circumstances that led him to become the curmudgeon that he was.
On a personal level, one of my favorite scenes in the story is when Scrooge is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. As a nostalgist myself, this particular glimpse into Scrooge’s former life always strikes an emotional chord in me.
If you need a refresher course: The child-like Ghost of Christmas Past provides Scrooge with a series of visions that chronicle his unhappy childhood, a failed engagement to his fiancée, Belle, and the death of his business partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge’s one happy memory, his apprenticeship under the benevolent mentorship of Mr. Fezziwig, is the bright spot in his unwanted trip down memory lane. By the time the spectre releases old Scrooge from her ghostly grasp, he is angry and distressed, weighed down by the fresh reminder of a life that he has long since tried to erase from memory.
I wonder if, like me, some of you deeply resonate with this part of the story? Not with the ghostly visitations, but with carrying past memories that not only amplify every year at this time, but become harder and harder to shake over time.
For you, it might be a hidden sin that you have kept concealed and unconfessed for quite some time. Maybe it’s a broken relationship with a parent or sibling that continues to fill you with ongoing sadness and regret. It could be some harmful things that were done to you that you have experienced very little healing from. For some of us, we might recall decisions that were made in the past that have had tremendous consequences for us in the present.
What does the Lord have for our pasts that we carry with us like heavy weights into Christmastime and the new year?
Before I get to that, let me qualify a few things. When we talk about our pasts, I realize we are talking about not only heavy weights, but deep oceans. Because of that, a short article like this is going to fall incredibly short of covering the nuances that a book, counseling, or therapy session could more helpfully provide. What I am attempting to do in this limited space is merely consider what the Lord is offering to us as we walk down this wearisome road at this special time of the year.
He Has A Purpose
Does that sound trite? Do I hear a mental groan as you read this, “I know He has a purpose, Ronnie, but right now I just feel so weighed down.”
What’s amazing about the Lord’s wonder-working ways is that in moments when it seems like He is the least involved, we realize later that He couldn’t have been more invested.
The story of Joseph affirms this.
“But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You planned evil against me; God planned it for good to bring about the present result—the survival of many people” (Genesis 50:19-20).
The salvation of Jesus affirms this.
“When the time came to completion, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4-5)
God does what God does in the time God decides to do it, and there is nothing arbitrary about that. Somehow, our pasts aren’t enough to thwart the purposes of God. If you believe the Lord was not absent during all of your bad decisions, it allows some of that self-condemnation to turn into a more grace-aware, soul-transformation. Granted, there is pain contained in soul-transformation. Part of the pain we experience in the fruition of God’s purposes comes through the hardship of waiting. But without waiting, hope has no soil from which to grow. So God ordains our waiting so that hope becomes less theoretical and more tangible. It’s so purposeful. And painful. But this God who loves us is no bad parent. He lets us experience divine discomfort for the sake of divine joy. There is no other way, and there is no other love like the Lord’s in the midst of it, either.
He Provides Perspective
All the “coulda’s, woulda’s, and shoulda’s” are the stuff that cast a bright light on God’s shepherding heart.
“A person’s heart plans his way, but the Lord determines his steps” (Proverbs 16:9).
We think that our plans and decisions set us on an irrevocable path, but Scripture reminds us that even our bad, misinformed, naive, and even harmful decisions from our past still have a redemptive future for those who ‘“do not rely on our own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). This means that we can look at our pasts with increased perspective when we remember that the Lord still determines our steps through every decision we make.
Does this feel like something too difficult to grasp at times?
It absolutely does, but we’re in good company with the saints who have come before us. Hebrews 11 (the “Hall of Faith”) is a laundry list of men and women with questionable pasts who were cared for by the Lord even as they faced futures that sometimes turned fatal. How does this knowledge help shape our perspective? It helps us not to attribute god-like power to our plans, but to trust that whatever happened in the past, due to our own decisions or the decisions of others, doesn’t destabilize the Lord.
This is why prayer is like a lifeline in gaining a more profound perspective. Whenever we feel tempted to walk down the dead-end cul-de-sac of Memory Lane, prayer reroutes us and puts us back on a sure path.
“I call on you in the day of my distress, for you will answer me. Lord, there is no one like you among the gods, and there are no works like yours” (Psalm 86:7-8).
He Has A Perfect Future
Let me get personal here for a second. Sometimes it is incredibly hard for me to reconcile my past, especially when I think of how much better a “place” I would be in if only I could go back and redo some of my colossal (and even not-so-colossal) failings due to bad, impulsive, foolish, and faithless decisions. I lose my sense of perspective so quickly. I forget that God’s eternal purposes for the good of my soul are impossible to eradicate. What I’m trying to say is that because of Jesus, I have a perfect future waiting for me that my past has no power to edit or eliminate.
Yes, some of us will carry some horrible pasts with us into Christmastime and New Year’s. But because of the incarnation, we also carry a hopeful future that changes how we interpret even our most painful past.
“Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
This Christmastime, my prayer is that the Lord would marvelously shift our focus to the unseen, eternal hope that has been given to us through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ and his coming.
A better weight to carry.
