Day 7: Jesus is the Only Truly Safe Time Machine

As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He said to another man, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” LUKE 9:57–62 NIV, EMPHASIS MINE

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” “But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?” . . . [Jesus] went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” JOHN 11:5–8, 11 NIV, EMPHASIS MINE

I RECENTLY HEARD A pastor teach about how honest reflection is healthy but how an ongoing preoccupation with the past or acute nostalgia—longing to go back to a previous time in your life—can be dangerous. Naturally, this got me to thinking about my history, and about the passages I’ve read in Scripture about “going back” to some former place we’ve once been. In some places Jesus tells us not to go back—to press forward (see Luke 9 above). Yet in other places (see John 11 above), He shepherds His followers to do the opposite, to go back, even at great risk. And, over time, I’ve come to realize the difference between the two.

Forty years ago I was a sophomore in college, besotted with all things preppy, anxious about who to invite to the Kappa Delta winter formal, and trying to earn the approval of everyone I met. Yet while I masqueraded as a happy-go-lucky, Christian sorority girl, I was convinced that God was disappointed with me. Because while I’d been raised by a Jesus-loving mama who didn’t play when it came to being in church every time the doors were open, praying before every meal, reading the Bible every morning and evening, and who strongly encouraged me to fork over a big chunk of my lifeguarding money to the Lottie Moon offering, I was also carrying heavy shame that came with the sense of abandonment caused when my dad left us to quickly marry the “other woman,” as well as the sexual molestation and abuse I experienced multiple times throughout childhood and adolescence. Even as I was leading Bible studies with a big, chatty crew of other coeds, I secretly wondered how in the world a perfect God could completely accept and unconditionally love a damaged girl like me.

If I could give my nineteen-year-old-running-scared-and-pretending-to-have-it-all-together self some advice, it would be these three basic truths:

1. Jesus’s love isn’t based on our deservedness or lack thereof; it’s rooted in His character, not ours.
2. The Bible’s overarching story proves that our Savior has a soft spot for the precious people our world cruelly dismisses as losers; in fact, most of the people He elevates as leaders for kingdom causes came from the scratch-and-dent bin!
3. There’s no dark side to our Creator Redeemer. If you’ve put your faith in Jesus and the biblical truth that He’s already justified us by His sacrificial death on a cross and subsequent bodily resurrection, you can exhale and lean fully into His embrace because, though this life will come with ups and downs, no other proverbial shoe is going to drop when it comes to your eternal future.

It’s taken decades of time spent with Jesus and time spent in a Christian therapist’s office for me to sort through the emotional detritus in my history and separate past memories into “keep” and “discard” bins. It took lots of hard work, buckets of tears, and consistent and safe counseling to learn to feel what our Great Physician would ultimately heal. Mind you, I’m not “fixed”—my heart still bears a few jagged scars—but I’m freer than I ever hoped to be.

History doesn’t have an unhealthy grip on my heart and mind anymore. In fact, now I can see clearly how Jesus was/is compassionately attuned and accessible to me in every, single moment of my life, even during the super sad or scary times. The last piece of advice I’ve learned to remind my almost-sixty-year-old self of is this: don’t take field trips to the sinkholes of the past unless He’s driving the bus!

Why do I say that? Because in Luke 9, the people who wanted to “go back” were doing so without Jesus—and for motivations He could discern weren’t quite up to snuff. (In those times, funeral events happened twice; the first one being for mourning and proper burial, and the second being about receiving inheritance. Upon rigorous study, scholars say the people who wanted to “go back” in Luke 9 were preoccupied with obtaining family money, and Jesus wanted their allegiance to be with Him, not finances.) But in John 11, Jesus Himself ushered His own disciples to “go back” to Judea, even at great risk to the whole group, for the sake of resurrecting the dead. When Jesus is truly the one leading you to go back, follow Him! He is probably up to regenerating old, dead parts of you that need new life!

• WHAT CHAPTER(S) OF your life—if any—would you like to completely obliterate from memory?
• IF YOU HAVEN’T already, are you willing to revisit that season with Jesus as your wise guide and perfectly protective guard?