Monuments and Dreams

   Mayre and I have just spent two days in Savannah with our oldest son and his family. We had a good time together, and I am reminded of the sights we took in while there.

   Savannah is the oldest city in Georgia, founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, becoming the 13th of the original colonies. The city planners of that earlier era laid out a town with multiple squares of green spaces, small oases of quiet in the midst of the residential and commercial areas.

   I walked through and sat in many of these areas and thought about the earlier life of the people there, the hardships of the colonists, their victories and their defeats. Many of these squares had statuary in them, commemorating a particular person or event in their 275 plus years of existence. There were the victories of the Revolution in the 1700s as well as the defeats of the Civil War in the 1860s. There were the epidemics and fires of their earlier history as well as the growth and progress that continues today.

   My life is somewhat like that city. I have had victories and defeats. I have had periods of distress and jubilation, and I sometimes set aside places and build monuments to events and people. But I cannot just sit in the shade and remember all that has happened, both good and bad, and dwell on that. 

   This is the last morning and day of 2011 and tomorrow will begin a new year. As Chambers writes:

   "Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him."

   I had a funny dream last night, but maybe it fits into the things I am thinking about this morning. I had slipped into a service, in a church that I did not recognize, looking for a place to sit. I realized that the back pew, all former Baptists tend to gravitate to this area, had room for one more if I asked the person on the end to scoot down. But before I could tap them on the shoulder and ask, I decided to go down about four rows and sit in an unoccupied pew. It seemed like I knew the person on the end of the back pew, but who it was I don't know, it was just a person I knew from the past.

   Could it be that the dream meant that I was not to sit down and continue to remember life in the past, but to move to a new seat and live there, being open to anyone and anything that God chose to bring to my new area. Maybe it was a silly thought, and maybe not, but It fit the analogy.

   It would seem that the purpose of remembering is to spur us on to greater things in the present and future, but I am not to just sit there. There is life to be lived and it happens in the present.

   Paul says in Philippians "Forgetting what is past, I press on....", but I might change the word forgetting to not dwelling on. So...

   Bring on 2012. With God's help the monuments I build for others to see will be those of victories and not defeats.