Nostalgia

I am a fan of comedians. I have to keep my life loose because of the way my personality is, my brain can be filled with a lot of the reality of life. One of my favorites is Demetri Martin. The man can get pretty crass, but some of his jokes to me are some of the funniest things I've heard. His type of humor are these quick one or two line type jokes, not these long elaborate stories that most comedians have. He has this one where he says, “I remember when I used to really be into nostalgia.” Oh... nostalgia.


Every year around this time I get in this really nostalgic mood where I begin to think about my life and whether I like what's going on. I mean, I do this regularly anyway, but during this time it's heightened to a ridiculous level. This is because on April 5th seven years ago I recommitted my life to Christ after walking away from him for a couple years of my life. When this time of year comes along for me, I use it as a marker to think about how life is going, what God has done in me over the last year, two years, three years, seven years, whatever. This year is kind of the quintessential nostalgic year for me. Adding on to the seven year mark of following Christ I'm 43 days away from graduating from college. HOLY CRAP! So now I'm thinking about college specifically and my journey during this brief period of my life. For those of you who don't know, my college experience hasn't exactly been a rosy one. In fact, it's been four hard years that many times I feel like I was just scraping by in life to make it to the end.


I look back on my college years and I'm astounded at so many things. I'm amazed by God's grace to work out incredible details to get me to where I am right now in my life. I am so beyond thankful for His faithfulness to me even when I've ignored Him, rebelled against Him, wrestled with Him, and more times than I could count cried out to Him with the question of “why?” It's not that I went through such intense suffering as some people do, but some circumstances brought to my attention some of the deepest questions we have as human beings. I really had never experienced heartache in any way shape or form before I reached college, but I definitely have now.


I'm not here to divulge a bunch of information as to what happened to me because I don't want to come across as a guy looking for a pity party from a bunch of people. I don't want it or need it. What I want to tell you about is something so much better and greater than the pain I felt. I can tell you the main question that I've been asking of the Lord over the last few years, “Have I been doing right by You, Lord? Have I been doing what You want me to do? Have I made choices that have honored You?” I had been so busy recently that I totally forgot about these questions in my brain, but this morning for some reason as I was waking up, eating cereal, preparing for the day and reading in 2 Corinthians 11 that they came flooding back again.


The nature of these questions has nothing to do with areas of sin in my life. I absolutely know where I am sinful and those questions are irrelevant for those situations. What I'm more talking about is asking the questions in areas of decision making in following God's heart, and whether we've done it for the Lord or for ourselves. I can honestly say that I look back at my time in college and I have mistakes that I feel haunt me in many ways. Because of the way my personality is being a deep thinker, I tend to think about how I would have done things differently and maybe the outcomes would have been different. Here's a simple example: about five months ago, I began to plot out how I had done my classes because I saw that I only had to take 7 credits of classes to graduate this semester and asked the question, “How close was I to graduating a semester early?” Now that I had asked the question, I had to get an answer and I realized that if I had really pushed myself hard over three and a half years, I could have been graduated by now. Unfortunately, I was doing this at a time when I was especially frustrated with the school so that just added to my frustration.


But, I started looking back at some of the situations in my life that have some unanswered components to them and I did what I've done so many times and just asked the Lord, “Please, tell it to me straight. I want to hear from you. Have I done right by You?” The Lord then brought to my attention something that He has harped on me so many times. Often when we ask for answers, we're asking the wrong question. If you look at the question, the subject and focus is me. What have I done wrong? What could I do better? Have I done right? The reality is that those are the wrong questions to be asking in terms of our relationship with the Lord because we are not the focus. The focus is upon Him and His faithfulness to us even though we can be faithless. We ask if we've done right because we're seeking some sort of validation from Him that we're okay and that we've been hearing Him all along, which isn't altogether a bad thing.
One of the many lessons I've learned over the years is that we cannot live in regret over mistakes that we've made or in wondering whether we've done something wrong by someone else. We can't replay mistakes over and over again in our minds thinking of how we would have done things differently because in reality, we cannot change them and would make the same decision every time. There is absolutely nothing about our past that we can change. I look at my mistakes and I see that God used those mistakes to turn me into the man that I am becoming, and that is exciting. If you would have told me 4 years ago when I was getting ready to come to college that God was going to do what He has done these 4 years, I wouldn't have believed you. Not for a second. It's remarkable the change that God has made in this little broken vessel.


One of my favorite movie series of all time is the Lord of the Rings movies. There's a line in the first one that I absolutely love. Deep in the mines of Moria, Frodo is dealing with the frustration and agony with having the ring come into his possession and with the choices of his predecessors in terms of the ring. He says to Gandalf, “I wish the ring had never come to me.” Gandalf responds to him with a statement that I think many of us need to remember in our own lives. “It is not for us to decide what happens us to in this life. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” All we really can do with the things in this life is how we respond and what we do with them. Frodo decided that even though he didn't want the ring, he had to continue forward with his mission to go and destroy it because the task had been given to him and no one else. I look back at my college years and I had to learn that I couldn't be upset with myself with things that happened to me or the mistakes that I made, regrets I had, or uncertainties in choices but to respond and do something about what had been put in front of me. We can't regret the mistakes we've made because most of the time we went with all that we knew. I made the decisions I made based on things that I no weren't true now, but I cannot regret them because I didn't know any better.


The great thing about it is that we have a God who doesn't just let our mistakes hang over our heads, but that redeems them for His glory. God has taken all the junk from my four years of college and turned them into things that I cannot describe the beauty of to people. And yet, there are still so many things that have yet to be redeemed, hurts yet to be fulfilled, that will one day be fulfilled in this life and in the life He has in store for us at the end of all things. Thank You Jesus!


Here's a song by a man that has thought about this once or twice in his life that stirs this idea in my brain: