Forward Thinking


Do you ever intentionally take pictures of people you do not know because the setting is just perfect? Weird or not, I have done it. There are just those opportunities that you have to capture. As you can see in the pictures here, you do not see anyone’s faces and I will not disclose where or when they were taken.

But I started thinking about what these people were looking at. They were all taking time to stop and reflect and they cast their gaze on something, whether it is a sunrise, a waterfall, a lake or a horizon. Then I thought about the direction they were looking in. These people were all looking ahead. None of them looked behind or saw that I was taking a picture of them, thank goodness. That might have been embarrassing.

Looking forward and not behind….reminds me of one of my favorite scriptures.

Isaiah 43:18-19- Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness, and streams in the wasteland.

Reminders of our past are all around us. Reminders of where we have been and where we are now.  There are pictures and people, trophies and scars.

God tells us through the prophet Isaiah that we are not to dwell in the past, but should be moving forward into the future where He is doing new things. Things for our good. Paul said something similar in Philippian 3, “forgetting what is behind, straining toward what is ahead.” If anyone wanted to forget the things they had done, it was Paul.

I wonder if Paul regretted the things he did in his previous life, in his past. I was talking with my dad the other day about regrets. He asked if I had any. I thought about it for a moment and answered, “I do not”. Now I will admit that there are things that I should not have done in life (I feel most of us probably feel that way), but I do not regret them, because they have made me who I am. And even in the bad, like the apostle Paul, God has worked things out for my good. I cannot change the past and I do not know if I can change the future, but I can trust that God is here as he is there.

As we gaze into the distance out there somewhere, like the people in my photos, I encourage you into forward thinking and forward praying.

 





 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The One Who Knows (Selfies)

Image
  How many selfies do you have on your phone? If you have an Apple device you can go into your photos, click on Albums, and scroll down to see exactly how many selfies you have. Out of the 8,500 photos on my iPhone, I have nearly 1,400 selfies. I love taking selfies of my husband and myself in all the places that we visit. My husband does not really like them so much. In fact, I am limited to a ‘one-selfie-a-day’ with him. With the invention of the smart phone, taking pictures is just a click away. People love to take pictures of the places they visit. Who better to take a picture of you or you and your family or friends or spouse, than YOU! The selfie, which is slang for, self-portrait, has been around for a long time. In fact, Leonardo Da Vinci painted a self-portrait in 1512. The term “selfie” has not been around for that long. The first recorded use of the term “selfie” is from 2002 and then in 2013 it was chosen by Oxford English Dictionary as the Word of the Year. [1] When we
Read more

Advent Speed Bumps

Image
  One of my least favorite things is a speed bump. We see them called different things. Speed bump, speed hump, speed table. I even saw speed “lump” in Mobile, Alabama. The speed bump is a type of traffic calming device that has been in existence since the 1950s and is placed on a roadway in order to slow the traffic. Have you ever missed the sign for a speed bump and your vehicle goes flying over the bump, everything in the car including yourself are quite jostled? You wonder, what just happened? I wonder if you ever feel that way going through the season of Advent. You hurry, hurry, hurry right through the season and bump right into Christmas. You have last minute gifts to get, food to buy, dinners and desserts to make. Some prepare to travel far distances. The season of Advent becomes the season of Hurry. Hurry does not make us a very calm people. Hurry will tire us out. Before you know it, you will go over that speed bump without even knowing what hit you. As we coast through A
Read more

Beautiful Feet

Image
  I grew up singing the hymn, “Our God Reigns” by Leonard Smith (1974), as it is found in the Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church. Just a verse and a chorus echoing the words of Isaiah 52:7, “How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” Meet those of us with beautiful feet! At the 2024 University of Dubuque Theological Seminary’s commencement ceremony, my classmate and friend Jerusha exclaimed, “Look at all our different shoes, each shoe style says a lot about who we are as a person. We must take a picture!” As you can see in the picture we have all kinds of different shoes; sandals, moccasins, dress shoes, stilettos, wedges, tennis shoes, open toe, and closed toe. When I look at the picture, I know what shoe belongs to which graduating seminary student. I think about each person and the ministries they are about to enter. When we entered seminary
Read more