The Flow of Time
One thing I love about the British is their sense of history. Of course it helps that they’ve been around a little longer than we have, but still, they have gone a long way to preserve it. Standing in one of the halls at Windsor Castle, I could look at flags from the Knights of the Garter dating back hundreds of years ago. This order still exists today and is a high honor in the realm.
The entire castle was full of reminders of the past as well as icons of the present. The overwhelming sense I got was that they were proud of where they had been and they knew where they were going. It wasn’t a snapshot or an outdated, musty museum of relics, but a living representation of a country in motion.
The issue of being connected to the continuum of time had already been rumbling around in me, but God orchestrated the timing of my visit to the castle so I could be at a place where I could FEEL it. I had a sense of my place in time, that time was flowing through me, just like I could see it flowing through the halls of the castle. The past felt like a force propelling me into the future, like every one of those flags spoke to a new generation of the things they could achieve if they wanted to. It was inspiring and sobering in its responsibility.
I realized that we have developed a very dangerous habit in our culture of living in isolated segments. We generally feel little to no connection to our heritage, our upbringing (many try to forget it!), the land of our birth, or our past in general.
It seems that the issue of being disconnected from time is more prevalent in the United States than in other nations, and I have often wondered why that is. It is true that we have a very short history and made a purposeful break from our roots when we established this nation. But even then, people where deeply connected to their past and it helped propel them forward. It seems to be in more recent years, and I have wondered if it was rebellion against tradition in the 60s, or perhaps farther back with the Great Depression and the humiliation of abject poverty that broke the spirit of the American people. Not entirely sure, but it is quite obviously present in many of the Boomer generation, and very much in the Gen Xers. No rootedness in relationships, jobs, land, or much of anything.
You may ask why it matters. Well, for at least one very important reason, it matters because there are incredible resources available to us from the past. Most of us haven’t come anywhere near unpacking that full potential, which means we have less to offer God. Secondly, we know from Biblical principles that God placed high value on REMEMBERING. It is a theme that occurred over and over again in the Old Testament, and showed up in a majestic way with The Last Supper.
And last, but certainly not least, it has a huge effect on our interpretation of reality, our sense of our place in history, and our ability to move forward. Someone once gave me a great picture of this. He said that life is like a rowboat: you go forward while looking backwards. This is not to say that we LIVE in the past, because we surely want to live in the present, with plans for the future. But we are at a severe disadvantage if the past does not come with us. God created a continuum of time for a reason. We are supposed to be connected to it. And if we are not on a signficant enough level, it will have a huge impact on our emotional stability.
So, to this end, I am going to post a series of blogs on this page with my thoughts, discoveries and tools on how to connect, or re-connect to elements of your past, whether personal or generational, and to capture those resources for moving forward.
As one of my favorite authors says … Further up and further in!
Beyond the Horizon 