Rearview mirror

(c) 2007 Bill Frymire

     
Remember the wonders He has done, His miracles, and the judgments He pronounced. – 1 Chronicles 16:12 NIV
     
     
Before the days of digital devotionals, I used the blank backside of the front cover of my printed copy of Our Daily Bread to record prayer requests. This way, my prayer list and my daily readings were all in one place. When the month was up, I often tore off that cover and stuffed it into the new booklet until I had time to copy the prayer list.
     
One day while cleaning out my devotional basket, I came across those old prayer lists. Reading them over, I was amazed at how many of those requests had been answered. Perhaps not in the time or manner I’d wanted them to be, but, looking back over time, I could definitely see the hand of God. And my flagging faith was fortified.
     
A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of not looking back at our past mistakes. But that doesn’t mean we never look back. We need to.
     
For it is only when we peer into the rearview mirror of life that we can see the hand of God more clearly than we could at the time, when doubts and despair, like dust swirling through the air, cloud our perspective.
     
I look in the rearview mirror,  and I see ways God provided for my needs—a tank full of heating oil just before winter when we didn’t have the money to buy it, boxes packed with groceries left on our front porch by an anonymous giver at a time we didn’t have two nickels to rub together, money for gas so I could drive to Alabama to see my mother one more time before she died. Oh, I could go on and on and on . . . but you get the idea.
     
In the rearview mirror I see God’s faithfulness, deliverance, presence, protection, and provision.
     
What I don’t see in the rearview mirror are my mistakes, my sins. For God has removed them from me “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12). If God forgave me and remembers my sin no more (Jeremiah 31:34), why should I remember and beat myself up about it?
     
I often quote St. Paul, who wrote that he forgets what’s behind and reaches for what’s ahead (Philippians 3:13). What Paul was forgetting was his utter failure to meet up to God’s standards on his own.
     
And so we, too, should forget our failures.
     
But God wants us to remember the good things—His able protection, His abundant provision, His abiding presence.

Why else would He command the Israelites to set up a memorial with stones from the Jordan River (Joshua 4), to observe the Passover Feast, to never forget the many ways He delivered them from the time He saved them from the Egyptians to the time they entered the Promised Land, 40 years later?
     
Why else would Jesus say at the Last Supper over the bread and the wine, “Do this in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22:19)?
     
What do you see when you look in the rearview mirror of your life?
     
     
Thank you, God, for what I see in the rearview mirror. Amen.
     

More tea: Read Joshua 4

Daddy and the poppies

Image courtesy of dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

      
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. – John 15:13 (NIV)
      
      
One of the earliest memories I have is of my father “buying” me a poppy from a man in a military uniform outside our church on a Sunday morning. As I grew older, I came to understand that when Dad put money in the can, he was donating to a local veterans’ organization.
      
A World War II veteran of the US Army, my father didn’t talk about his service. He’d been defending the continental United States on the godforsaken island of Attu when he was wounded. Shrapnel in his spine left him recuperating in a VA hospital for a year.
      
How I wish I would have asked more questions! But I was young with my own life ahead of me, and had little, if any, interest in something that didn’t directly affect me.
      
Now I regret that selfish attitude. At 62, I realize my roots are as important as my wings. I have plenty of questions now. Where was he stationed? What was his Army job? I know he’d attained the rank of sergeant but little else. I may never know this side of eternity. My parents, and that generation of relatives who could have given me answers, are all gone now.
      
I wrote to the Veteran’s Administration for my dad’s service records, but unfortunately a fire had destroyed them. I researched “Attu” online and learned that had the Japanese won that historic battle on the westernmost Aleutian island, we may well have fought World War II on continental American soil. I sent for the DVD of the PBS documentary, Red, White, Black, and Blue, “a wrenching look at a forgotten battle.”
      
But I’d rather have the story from my father’s point of view. It would mean so much more to me.
      
So every year, in memory of my father, I “buy” a poppy and entwine it on my purse. If I have a grandchild with me, I get one for them, too.
      
“My daddy—your great-grandfather—always got me a poppy,” I say. “Do you know where the idea for poppies came from?” 
      
Then I tell them about the poem written by Lt. Col. John McCrae in 1915, during World War I: “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row.”
      
I tell them about Moina Michael, who, in response to McCrae’s poem, went out and bought a bouquet of poppies and distributed them, asking that they be worn in tribute to the fallen. Donations were given to servicemen in need.
      
If I still have their attention—and I make sure I do—I recite the verse she penned: “We cherish, too, the poppy red That grows on fields where valor led, It seems to signal to the skies That blood of heroes never dies, But lends a luster to the red Of the flower that blooms above the dead in Flanders Field.”
      
“And today,” I say, concluding the brief history lesson, “red poppies are made by disabled veterans in hospitals, with the donations going to support a variety of veterans’ organizations.”
      
And then I give them a poppy.
       
      
Let not loyalty and faithfulness forsake you; bind them about your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. - Proverbs 3:3
      
      
Father, let the poppy also remind us of the sacrifice Your Son made for our eternal freedom. Amen.