“When God speaks of a ‘new’ covenant, it means he has made the first one obsolete. It is now out of date and will soon disappear.”  Romans 8:13

Well, here we are on the precipice of a brand new year! It seems like the years pass by more quickly the older I get, or perhaps it’s just the older we get the more we value our time. I guess that’s why I prefer to fly rather than drive when Ann and I are traveling any great distance—that and I’m a rather impatient driver!  

Speaking of traveling, most of us do our fair share of boarding planes, trains and automobiles this time of the year. I remember when I was a little guy, as we traveled out and about on Christmas Eve to visit relatives I was awed by the holiday lights on trees and houses, nativity scenes lit up, and Santa all aglow.

One thing sticks out in my memory about some of those trips though. For a few years our family went over the river and through the woods in my dad’s Ford Fairlane station wagon. It was the mini-van of the day, and had a fold up seat in the back that faced out the rear window. It was kind of a novel thing sitting there watching where you’ve been. I missed the full measure of the Christmas sights as they whizzed by and got smaller in the distance. So, when on the way to grandmother’s house, we liked to sit facing forward, it wasn’t much fun looking at where we already had been.

Sadly, too many of us spend a whole lot of our life looking at where we've already been. You know— dwelling on the past, rehearsing those past hurts, and past slights, past injustices. And we can spend a lot of time looking backward, not just at things that have been done to us, but at things we've done. We keep rewinding those past failures, and mistakes. We can't seem to ever close the chapters that are already behind us. So, they're not over for us because, well, we keep dragging the past into our present and our future.

Maybe this word from the Word of God is for you at this point of life— an encouragement to face the other direction, to trade in despair for hope. In Isaiah 43:18 & 19 God gets right to the bottom line: "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland." Stop looking backward— focus on the road ahead God says. Why? Because the past can't be changed. So, focusing on what can't be changed can only lead to paralyzing self-pity and shame and bitterness, despair, and depression. Focusing on the past is a recipe for hopelessness.

And God says, "If you keep dwelling on the past, you're going to miss the whole new thing I'm trying to do in your life!" This isn't living in denial—that means you've never faced the ugly things in the past, and frankly, there's no conquering them until you face them. But if you just keep dredging them up over and over, you're missing so much of what God wants to be doing in your life now.