A New View of the Past
All of us grow up with deficiencies – some of them greater and more noticeable than others. I grew up in a really good family. For the most part we were stable and the environment was supportive and enjoyable, although as I grow older I realize how much it lacked in depth. We didn’t process well, and when we needed to we didn’t know how.
This was a huge gap for me, and it impacted other areas of my life. I was not the most confident kid (deficiency #2 among many…not all to be listed here), and it would have been good to process some of the feelings of loneliness and questioning with my parents. When I got to the teen years I hadn’t developed a pattern of communication, so everything was always ‘fine’ and my struggles remained internal.
All of us lack something from our early years, and perhaps our later as well. I used to get frustrated by the presence of these imperfections, but I’m learning to look at them in a different way now. Truth: No one has a perfect life. Some of us may have less painful lives, but we all share the presence of imperfection. It should come as no surprise to us imperfection, and therefore the pain and consequences thereof, are a part of our history. Their presence is certain. What is uncertain is what we will choose to do with them. As much as it is true no one has a perfect life the following is also true: Life is a journey where God makes old things new, ugly things beautiful, and empty places full.
For most of my life, as I began to realize and experience the effects of my shortcomings in character and development, I would become frustrated, angry, or bitter at why things couldn’t have been better. Why couldn’t things have been better, different? As I began to accept the fact no one has a perfect life I also began to understand how God makes beautiful, new, whole those areas that I formerly lacked. Instead of seeing them as deficiencies, I now see them as grace. I look over the sum total of my meager thirty-three years of life and see how, in a relatively short time, God has filled in the gaps.
God has used experiences, other people, learning, and the like to fill in the missing pieces. While I won’t be perfect, I will be whole. The areas of emptiness will be filled as God, who is rich in mercy and love toward me (and you) meets the voids with overflowing grace we cannot plan for.
Our pasts are imperfect, fragmented, and fractured. If we look in retrospect at the years gone by we may be able to see how God worked in very gracious ways, even when being uninvited. He loves his kids (you and me) that much.
Questions:
– What are the areas of pain in your past?
– Where have you felt the effects of your own imperfections or the imperfections of others? How have they impacted you?
– Where is God in this? Has he worked to remedy what has been done to you, or what you have done? Are there things you still hold onto in a broken state you need to allow God to make whole?
– Does the pain of your past, other’s shortcomings or your own, define you? Or, does grace overflow into those areas, redefining them?