I’ve been trying to shop my closet. I want to save the world (or at least be part of it) and I don’t want things to sit around going unused. There is nothing sadder than having a house full of things you don’t use or need. In shopping my closet I can see what I love and what I do no care for.
I’ve found myself looking back a lot lately and I suppose it has something do with the fact that I’m very quickly approaching 40. That and there is the very real and strange phenomenon that one might call “The return of the 90s”. All of the things we wore back in the day appear to be fashionable once more. You know what I’m talking about. Friends and scrunchies and Mom jeans are all the rage.
This morning as I was looking back and digging into the collection in my closet I found a pair of nude wedges that looked brand new and I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t worn them. I got them three years ago for an interview and then they had just sat on my shoe rack. Now I am not a shoe hoarder. I have a tendency to wear the same shoes every day but am trying to break that habit so I pulled these shoes out, dusted them off and took them out for a spin.
It was a terrible decision. My feet hurt. The shoes kept slipping off. They clearly did not fit well. They look good but looks are apparently deceiving. So why did I keep them? I don’t entirely know but what I do know is that I’m probably not alone in this. We tend to keep things we don’t like because we’ve invested money and time on them. We don’t want to waste and so we put them back in their corner until three years from now when we have forgotten why we hated them in the first place.
The cycle ends today for those shoes. I’ll throw them up on Poshmark or give them to Goodwill but I won’t be putting them back on my feet. If I do, I’ll just be reliving a very bad cycle. And I don’t need to relive my bad decisions.
We don’t need to relive any bad decisions, do we? And yet so very often we do. We sit and stew on our past experiences. We sit and stew on the mistakes of others. We dwell on what happened and what didn’t happen and say we’ve let it go when in fact we’ve tucked them away in the closets of our minds until three years later when we pull it out to stew over them once more. It shouldn’t be this way. We don’t need to hold on to the past. We can move forward in the confidence and hope found in the Good News.
Paul says it this way “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14)
Let us not be afraid to let go of what is behind and strain towards what is ahead. Let us not be afraid to let go and move on. Movement is key in life. Movement towards and into. Our God is a God of movement. The Living God. A giver of life and breath and movement. May we never become stuck. Let us push on, release and surrender. Let us strain always towards what lays ahead in God’s vision for our future.
