When I search for a relaxing thought, I invariably go to an earlier time in my life. Most of what I pick is idyllic–lying around reading comics, climbing trees, building dams down at the creek, playing board games with my siblings. That’s all there was to life.
But the truth is, at the time, I had my share of headaches and annoyances. Really bad.
For instance, due to a strong dislike of school, I experienced a lot of consternation over my grades. I took to altering my report card (which never fooled my dad) and ditching homework under bushes (which my parents eventually discovered). Sometimes my mom announced that we kids were due for a dose of Milk-of-Magnesia, after school, to “help keep us regular.” I actually would dread the end of that day, because M.O.M. gave me strong gag reflexes. And of course, there was the annual shopping for school clothes, a dreadful event worse to me than having head lice. Add into the mix chores, sibling warfare, and boredom, and I would have preferred to be anywhere else but there.
If you had told my ten-year-old self I would one day reminisce about that time in my life, I would have called you crazy.
But I do exactly that now because I’ve forgotten the bad parts. Or at least, I choose to forget them.
We humans have an incredible ability to rewrite, or at least play down our own history. It borders on a superpower.
Consider the Israelites:
Now the rabble that was among them had a strong craving. And the people of Israel also wept again and said, “Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at” (Num. 11:4-6).
This is the editing power of the flesh at work: Cravings and unsatisfied lusts make us willing to exaggerate our current problems–our strength is dried up! We exalt the creature comforts of our past, even if they were cheap vegetables from a pocket garden—leeks and onions! We’re even willing to discount the present grace of Christ that sustains us–manna–as something tiresome.
The Israelites went so far as to eliminate the memory of the bondage they had been under. Their back-breaking labor vanished from their dishonest memories, along with the Egyptian whips, and the genocidal fiats of Pharaoh.
The short-sighted heart despises this current moment of manna and wilderness, and wishes to go backward where things were “comfortable.” There is only one direction for all of us.
Forward.
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18).
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This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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