What keeps us looking back...
Illustration
What keeps us looking back? Throwing glances over our spiritual and emotional shoulder to the past? The gospel lists obligations and normal daily pressures, but Jesus casts them in terms of realities that can deaden and destroy spiritual sensitivity to God's call. The submission to the joys of the future God has in store for us must be accompanied by a submission to God of what we have left behind.
Flora Wuellner writes about "With Christ into the Unknown Future," but a chapter prior to that is titled "With Christ to the Painful Past." It raises the issue of whether we are the dead burying the dead, unable to move forward with Christ for various reasons.
She tells what happens when we put our hand to the plow and move with Christ.
"No wound is so trivial that the love of God is not concerned with it. No pain is so deep, so long-standing, that the love of God cannot reach it. Every shock, every bleeding wound, every anger and grief is not only encompassed by that love but is also held and transformed by that love. The fact that it is in what we call the 'past' makes no difference to the power of God's love. All times are open and present to that unsleeping, all-embracing consciousness. God asks only our willingness."
(Flora Slosson Wuellner, Prayer, Stress & Our Inner Wounds. Nashville: The Upper Room, 1985. p. 28).
--Hedahl
Flora Wuellner writes about "With Christ into the Unknown Future," but a chapter prior to that is titled "With Christ to the Painful Past." It raises the issue of whether we are the dead burying the dead, unable to move forward with Christ for various reasons.
She tells what happens when we put our hand to the plow and move with Christ.
"No wound is so trivial that the love of God is not concerned with it. No pain is so deep, so long-standing, that the love of God cannot reach it. Every shock, every bleeding wound, every anger and grief is not only encompassed by that love but is also held and transformed by that love. The fact that it is in what we call the 'past' makes no difference to the power of God's love. All times are open and present to that unsleeping, all-embracing consciousness. God asks only our willingness."
(Flora Slosson Wuellner, Prayer, Stress & Our Inner Wounds. Nashville: The Upper Room, 1985. p. 28).
--Hedahl
