faith unfaded

Have you ever worked a plow? I have not, but I have mowed the lawn. It’s pretty similar. Eyes straight ahead, cut in a straight line lest you leave big patches because you were too busy looking back.

My father did not like the way I used to cut the yard in intricate designs—a figure eight, a circle, diagonal lines. I left patches of grass all over the yard!

I imagine my Heavenly Father felt the same way. I tried to follow Him with my head in the clouds, my eyes looking around, and my heart choosing whatever fancied me the most in the moment.

No one, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. Luke 9:62

I finally learned to plow under the tutelage of the Master Gardener. The beloved hymn is a constant refrain in my heart…

The world behind me, the cross before me;
No turning back, no turning back.

Focused and determined, I plow straight ahead—no turning back, no turning back.

But I still end up with a few spotty patches of grass at times when I look too long at the past. It is never because I want to go back, but because I want to understand.

And there are some things you just aren’t going to fully understand this side of Heaven.

I spent 23 years in a marriage I thought was good. Sure there were problems, but doesn’t every marriage have its issues? It wasn’t until I left that I realized just how off-center things had been. Still, I made peace with the past, moving forward and focusing on the good.

When I’d question certain situations or wonder if my entire marriage had been one big deception, the Lord would remind me that you can’t move forward by looking back. I left the past in the past, preferring to give grace. I had not been perfect either.

But two years after what I thought had been an amicable divorce-turned-friendship, he began calling people—including my own children—making accusations about me that were both alarming and untrue. I confronted him once—the familiar manipulation and gaslighting on full display as he twisted the words he’d spoken—and then severed all communication. This only ramped up his efforts to discredit me and the work I’m now doing.

I found my eyes darting around again, trying to figure out what was cognitive decline, what was revenge, and what was manipulation. What had been truth? When I found myself questioning someone else’s relationship with God, I knew I’d driven my plow straight into the pond.

I’m just not going to fully understand everything that happened between us, and I don’t need to. The past only serves to separate me from the future plans the Lord has for me.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:19

The Lord can’t do a new thing if I’m steadily looking back at the old.

It bothers me greatly that I have such a large part of my life with a giant question mark beside it. It makes it extremely difficult to write the chapters that happened during this time.

But the Lord’s command has never changed, no matter what else did: “When you come to a fork in the road, choose your path and don’t lament the roads you took to get there. You can’t go back.”

Otherwise you’re wasting your time and energy, and trading peace for the chaos you worked so hard to get out of.

Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:13-14