Day 33 - Letting Go of the Past

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. ~God

I’ve been putting off writing about letting go of the past, partly because it seems so cliché and partly because it’s very difficult.   What part of the past do I need to let go of? The last hour? Yesterday? Last week or last year? Maybe the last 10 or 50 years? And, the answer always comes back, “Yes,” to all. But they are very different types of letting go, aren’t they?What if you just spent the last hour in an argument with your best friend or your spouse, trying to prove your “rightness”? Or, what if you were unkind to a neighbor or a co-worker yesterday or last week simply because you were focused on yourself? Maybe you have just realized you have been prejudiced against a certain type of person and this prejudice has been going on for a lifetime. This narrative of the past is something you had a certain amount of control over and perhaps regret the way you handled things.There is another type of letting go of the past. There are narratives from our past over which we had little or no control. We cannot undo our past. We are, today, a product of our past…the past that we controlled as well as the past over which we had little or no control. Some of our past was good, wholesome and contributed to our flourishing. Some of it was damaging and painful and the memories continue to cause suffering.Letting go of the past requires humility and grace. Humility allows us to acknowledge our own limits and admit our frailties. In humility we can forgive or ask forgiveness and move on. But, moving on requires grace. Grace allows us to accept ourselves (and others) for who we really are. Lewis Smedes says, “Accepting ourselves is not the same as forgiving ourselves.” Accepting ourselves (and others) comes after we have done the hard work of forgiving. I have written about this elsewhere, so won’t belabor the point, but suffice it to say that forgiveness is a process and acceptance is the sense of wholeness that comes once the hard work of forgiveness is done.We are a beautiful mix of all our good and broken past. When I began writing this post, I assumed that letting go of our past implied letting go of the grip that our painful past has on us today. But I’m curious now if we might also need to let go of the “good” past.  As I pondered the passage of scripture from which I lifted the quote at the beginning of this post (Isaiah 43:16-21), I realized that God is telling the Israelites (through the prophet Isaiah) to forget the past where God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea during the grand, triumphant story of the Exodus—“and they [the Egyptian army] lay there, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick.” What? Forget the mighty acts of God? What an odd thing for God to say!God says, “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?” It seems God is drawing our attention to the present…to the NOW… to the eternal spring of God’s love and provision. As an eternal being, God lives outside of time in the eternal now. There is no past, present or future for God. All moments are now for God. (Try wrapping your mind around that!) As such, when we live in the present, pay attention to what is happening now and notice how God inhabits the current moment we are entering into a holy space. When we hang on to the past, however bad or good it was, we are less able to reflect the image of God in the present moment.So, we let go of the past IN ORDER TO be more present now, SO THAT we can more fully inhabit this sacred moment in union with God. Letting go of the past seems to have more of a point to it now. What do you think?