Leaving the Pain Behind

Leaving the Pain Behind
This Thursday Dawn and I would have been celebrating our 32nd year of marriage. Looking back to a year ago I can remember our last anniversary in every very vivid detail. The girls were staying with friends, we had just found out that there was nothing medically that could be done for her, so we called our dear friends Greg and Teresa at the Obrien Mountain Inn and they of course graciously invited us to come and stay. We were both so numb from the past month of tests and Doctor visits that in the beginning few words were spoken, there wasn’t much to be said. Dawn took a bath I put on our favorite CD at the Inn, Bebo Norman, and then I began to read the devotional on the table, one written by a favorite author, Max Lucado. There was peace in the midst of absolute chaos that night, there were shared memories of days gone by and little talk of the days ahead, after all what lie ahead was filled with fear and uncertainty. But our past was a safe place to visit tonight, you see this was a night when we focused on the moments of joy and triumph, memories that we could relive and enjoy together. This was not a night where we relived our mutual disappointments, or spoke of the should have, could have or would have moments. We talked more that night than we had in months, something we would find ourselves doing much of for the next all to short five months. While this behavior was one that was not completely strange to us the one noticeable change truly was the lack of focusing on or even mentioning the times we had disappointed or failed each other. You see we now understood the absolute waste of time and energy (something we had little of in each case), it was to focus upon such trivial matters. After all the standard we had set for one another was one that neither of us could have ever lived up to, and having now realized that to focus on it at all would be simply a waste of valuable resources.
As I look back now two days away from the anniversary of that night on the mountain, that night when without speaking of it or purposing to do so our priorities were suddenly changed, a night when what evil meant for harm God turned to good, I can now smile. I smile because even now those disappointing moments and former conversations that were not so edifying are just ever fading memories not worthy to ever be spoken of again. They have no further consequence or influence that would be edifying or uplifting, they are simply memories worth forgetting. My hope now has become that I may pass on this lesson to my children, grandchildren, and those who would read my rantings. The understanding of the utter importance of ignoring the truly unimportant, on straying away from using the disappointments of our loved ones as a weapon to inflict harm. You see those memories stay alive only as long as we feed them, only as long as we use them to harm ourselves and others, their life giving blood is our own anger and need for vengeance and the only winner is them, the only loser is us.
Just yesterday during a conversation with a friend the Lord spoke very clearly to me about the need for us to move ahead and focus on the day as opposed to the past. He showed me Lott and his family walking away from Sodom and Gomorra and He spoke these words “if I had not destroyed three past they would have returned to it, don’t go back”. You see the Lord is capable of destroying the negative influences of our past, He can if need be even do so in the physical and extreme sense that He did with Sodom. However I believe that His desire for us is to have us choose to step away, choose to close our minds to the influences of those memories, I believe that He would have us give them to Him, be healed and move on, never again to return to that place of pain and disappointment. if we are to have true victory, true deliverance, true healing, we must be willing to let the past die and live truly in the moment for one thing is for certain in this world, we have no guarantee for our very next breath!
Gene Burroughs