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 It wasn’t a snapshot or an outdated, musty museum of relics, but a living representation of a country in motion.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!
The capacity to feel time flowing around you is awesome!
I have a hunch that the break with time was heavily impacted by the massive numbers of WWI/WWII veterans that brought their PTSD-malfunctioning brains home with them from the wars.
Their diminished capacity to give life and their vows to “forget” the past created a powerful combination that deprived their progeny of many of the resources they naturally needed to build their history and build their future.
Megan I have found this particular posting so interesting as it addresses (but still does not answer) an issue I have grappled with for a number of years.
The background is that I am South African of British 1820 settler decent, we have our handwritten family tree that goes back to the 1600’s and the family can be traced back to the war of the roses which took place circa 1435.
But I define myself as 100% South African and if someone wanted to dig a little deeper I would add that I was of English extraction as this would explain much about my sense of humour, cultural leaning, cuisine and differentiate me from a South African of Dutch extraction or African extraction. So I would use this information to differentiate me, not define me.
I do not negate my origins, but they are also not my focus and there are some amazing documented historical facts about my family line to be proud of.
My first husband was born and raised in Wisconsin and when asked what nationality he would always say, Greek/Finnish. This confused me greatly as the last people in his family line to have been born in either Greece or Finland were his grand parents. So to me he was American, end of story. And since he was not the only person who was American who I met who did this it intrigued me.
For one it always fascinated me that Tiger Woods claims to be African American and yet he actually has far more Asian (1/2) blood vs African American (1/8).
But reading your post has set me to think about it in a different way and I have begun to wonder if it is not so much that people have wanted to forget their roots, than that the parting from them for many was so traumatic that they have never let go of them sufficiently to move forward into the here and now???
Think of the slaves who were ripped from their lives, families and homes, no wonder they wanted to imprint the memory of where they came from from their descendants. With this in mind one can look at Tiger Woods statement differently.
What I am saying does not conflict with what you are saying, because remembering is GOOD, but when one hankers for the past at the expense of the present then it is like the Israelites who hankered for the leaks and garlic of Egypt and we begin to bring about the same curses in our life that the Israelites did when they grumbled against Moses and Aaron and none of them passed into the promised land.
I see this not so much about remembering as not letting go, we can let go and still remember, but if we hang on to the past we cannot move forward to the promises of God.
So that is an observation from someone outside of your Nation, does any of it ring true to you?
Mary-Anne, I hear what you are saying and absolutely agree with the idea that we are not made to LIVE in the past. In fact, we can skew time a whole different way if we are LIVING in the past or the future instead of the present. We need to be engaged in the now, not longing for “the good old days” or just waiting for our circumstances to change.
The major aspect I want to address is our emotional condition. As you stated, you can know in your head things about your past, but the important thing is to engage with them in your heart. Own them. Let it actually be a part of you, not something you hold at arm’s length. In every moment of the present, we should be carrying the richness, value, wisdom, blessings, etc. of our lineage as well as our personal past. That often means a healing and reconciling process, but at the end of the day, if we want to carry all of our past resources forward with us into the future, we need to emotionally engage with them. Does that help differentiate between living in the past and carrying the past forward?
Thank-you, that makes sense, but how do I do this. I guess part of my strict Pentecostal baggage was to cut off from generational stuff good and bad and make your own way as “you will stand before God alone at the judgement”.
So in many ways I rejected the introspection of researching genealogy as we we taught that to do this was sin.
In fact, while my 3 older brothers inherited everything my father owned when he died, I got nothing except some books on our family history as part of the original settlers in South Africa and the family tree. About 3 months ago I gave all the things to my youngest brother because I did not have any interest and his interest is great.
So .. where do I go from here and how do I get connected and get the healing I probably need to enable me to get where you are?
Well, keep checking back on this topic. 🙂 What I hope to do is provide some tools for the very questions you are asking. It is sad to me that so much has been done to disconnect people from the value of the past, like you described with your upbringing. Generational blessings all by themselves are a HUGE gift to us, and are in themselves Biblical. God mentioned on more than one occasion of blessings going from one generation to the next, or made promises that would last through the generations. Arthur made a comment on one of the other pages about this being primarily a mindset vs. a matter of transience. I think that is very much the case.
Hello Megan… this comment comes a long time after your above article but I was moved to comment…
I’d like to mention that it seems God Himself wants us to remember the past when He instructed the Israelites to remember the Sabbath day … for in six days He created, but on the seventh day, He rested. He wants us to remember how He worked and created all things at the beginning and then He gave Himself rest, and desires that we, also, remember to rest as He did/does.
And He wanted us to observe Passover in rememberance of how He delivered “our ancestors” out of Egypt.
Even God Himself requires Himself to “remember” when He set a rainbow in the clouds to “remember the everlasting covenant between [Himself] and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Gen. 9:16).
We are to take the bread and the cup “in remembrance of Me”…
And there are many more throughout the Bible. It seems to me that God desires that we not only remember, but also to incorporate those remembrances into our lives for our own benefit, the benefit of others and to glorify Him.
And then there’s the one that says “I [God] will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:34). Thank goodness!!
I think He wants us to do a lot of remembering. We need to be reminded often as when looking away from a mirror we forget what we look like, what kind of person we are (James 1:23-24). We don’t really know who we are until we know from whence we came.
As an adopted person, during a search for my birth mother, I acquired “Non-identifying Background Information” regarding her. When I read that she was fair-skinned, with red hair, something was settled within me. My first thought was “I really did come from somebody. Somebody really did give birth to me”. When I finally received a family photo of my birth mother, grandmother, half-sister and niece, I saw that I had features like both my mother and grandmother and my niece had the same round cheeks, and soft, smooth reddish brown hair as I did. It was even cut and styled in a pixie-cut like mine was at that age. To top it off, years later, I learned that my birth mother had died on my birth date. (Not on the day I was bore. She died at age 69, I was 54.)
Knowing these things about my family began a healing process in me, helped me to feel accepted, affirmed. God had parted the very atmosphere like He had parted the seas, like He opened my mothers womb, to make room for me in this physical world. He had a plan and purpose for my existence, in spite of the poor circumstances by which I was conceived and born.
I know from my own experience that our past, our ancestry and our heritage is vital to our spiritual, emotional and even physical health. With all that we know today about generational curses and blessings, why wouldn’t we want to resolve the one and make room to receive the other, poured out shaken together spilling over!
Thank you for writing on this subject. As one Mercy to Another, may the Lord pour over you blessings upon blessings!