Remembering and Looking Back

Guessing can be frustrating especially for the one doing the guessing, and especially when the answer is beyond one’s imagination!

Well, guess anyway! What did I do yesterday?

Give up? I think you should :~)

Fighting a cold for 5 days (thankfully, not the flu!), I’ve spent far too much time in front of the TV. Yuk! What a waste of time…until yesterday! Are you ready for this?! I watched a replay of the 6^th game of the 1992 World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Atlanta Braves. The Jays won 4-3…and the World Series!

Okay! All right! I can hear…well imagine your groans. But I love baseball, and watching a game and knowing the outcome was far more enjoyable and extremely less stressful than the first go-around! Seeing Joe Carter’s smile, John Olerud’s productive patience, Jimmy Key and Mike Timlin’s pitching expertise…well, what can I say…except quote Wikipedia. “The game was decided in the 11th inning, when Dave Winfield doubled down the left-field line, driving in two runs. The Braves would again come within one run in the bottom of the 11th, but Jays’ reliever, Mike Timlin fielded Otis Nixon’s bunt, throwing to Joe Carter at first base for the final out. The Blue Jays became the first team based outside of the United States to win the World Series.”

Pretty neat, hmm!

Beyond sharing my passion for baseball and a game that took place twenty years ago, what’s behind the purpose of my reflection? I suppose it’s just the experience of remembering and looking back. After today, 2012 will be history and in all likelihood, I will find myself repeating the same experience: remembering and looking back.

This past year has provided some wonderful and inspiring moments for me, some things equal to that of a grand slam. But, as human nature would have it, I can’t help wondering what I could have done differently on far too many occasions, such as dealing with the frustration of wasted days with not enough productivity.

On the other hand, as I consider the past 365 days, I think of words I’ve shared before from my first novel, Come Find Me: “Life is not made of wishing this or that, but of looking ahead and not back.” Generally, I suppose—not intending to contradict myself— relationships that need to be healed or bad habits that need broken and replaced with new ones, looking back isn’t such a bad idea, especially if promise of change is in the wind.

Printed on a small copper plaque that was a gift in the 70s. It hangs on my cork board by my computer.

And speaking of making changes and promising ourselves that we will do this or that, the world seems to make the task easy for us by providing the New Year’s Resolution concept. I know; I’ve done it…many times, and equally as many times I have failed miserably.

So what is the answer? Do we just put our head down and plough ahead into the unknown? I think not.

Louise Haskins, an inspirational British poet penned the following that was quoted by H. M. King George VI in a wartime Christmas broadcast:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of GOD that shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”

I can’t think of a better way to look forward to the future, even one that is unknown. Can you?

Have a blessed and God-enriched New Year!