Friday evening found me sitting, once again, on the cold stone bleachers of the local high school football stadium. While I enjoy a good football game, it wasn't actually the game I was there to see. It was the band. Mumbles plays the sousaphone. If you're like I was at the beginning of the season you have no idea what a sousaphone is. Let me educate you. It's the marching band version of a tuba. It's huge, shiny and it always looks like it's strangling him as he wears it sort of around his neck. He's the only kid I know that can make that thing look cool. I think he gets that ability from his mother.
I was shocked at the wave of sentiment that threatened to overtake me as I sat in the cool fall air listening to the fight song floating out over the field. I have no personal history with high school football. My graduating class had a whopping 7 students, not exactly a sporting powerhouse. I'm not sure what caused such a strong emotion, maybe it was the feeling of expectation in the air, the feeling that anything was possible. Here was a whole school of kids with their whole lives stretching out ahead of them full of limitless opportunities.
On further reflection, I have decided part of what I was feeling was jealously, mixed with a little regret. How many times have we looked at our past and thought "if only"? If only I had known then what I know now, if only I had not made that choice, or dated that person, or walked away from that opportunity. When I look back there is so much I wish I had done differently, or not done at all. What kind of person would I have been if I had taken a alternative road from the one I took? Where would I be now? Would I have the same life? Would I have the same hang ups, the same troubles, the same "issues"? Does it really matter?
I believe there is a danger is looking back like this. The word tells us in Philippians 3:13-14
...But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
In other words, don't look back! Looking backwards is a good way to run off the road! I remember when I was preparing for my first horse show. I had arranged to take a lesson at a local prestigious stable. One thing they taught me that day has stuck with me all these years and I have had reason to apply it to life in general more than once. Before you want your horse to make a turn, you change what you are focusing on. If you are in the air over a jump and you know when you land you have to make a sharp right turn to make the next jump, you'd better be looking to your right while you're still in the air. You change your focus and your mount will follow.
What I'm stumbling around trying to say is things run smoother if you watch where you're going. You cannot move forward while looking back. So my goal this week will be to keep my spiritual peepers pointed where I want to go because, as we've heard today, your focus becomes your destination. I don't want my destination to become a foray into the land of could of, should of, would ofs. As difficult as some things in life may be, they are all part of who you are today. Just think, if you went back, sure, you may have that cheerleader body again, you may not have your grey hair, your stretch marks, your wrinkles and middle age spread, but you also would not have the wisdom you have gained through the years. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to learn all that over again!
Enjoy this week where you are. Don't look back. I'll be here working on facing the front and continuing to be forward focused. Now, if I could only find a place to store my pom poms........
Soaked in His blessings,
Spokenfor
