Going Back or Moving Forward

This afternoon, my brother and I finished a game that has two endings that ultimately boil down to a choice between going back or moving forward. One of the characters wants to go back because they had a good life with close bonds, and they want to get their life back, but they can't because too much time has passed, the people they knew have moved on, and there's no way to recapture what they've lost. Another character wants to move forward because they trust that whatever lies ahead of them is greater than that which lies behind them, but this is kind of scary, because no one really knows what lies ahead of them, so we have no way to predict whether it'll will be better or worse than what we've been through so far.

However, a little knowledge about the passage of time and a taste of the Eternal Perspective can make this choice between going backward or moving forward a lot easier. First, going backward is impossible. In fact, it's not even possible to forever stay where you are. Time is always moving forward, and it carries everyone along with it. Even if one can go back to the place where they once were, they can't go back in time, and since the unstoppable flow of time brings changes that are impossible to prevent, one cannot help but move forward, at least in time.

This truth can be frightening, but only if you don't know what lies ahead. Of course, no of us know what the immediate future holds, but we can know what our ultimate future holds, and we can know that every experience we go through on the way to our ultimate destination is a stepping stone that will help us get there. Good or bad, each event and situation gives us experience, which can help us develop the wisdom to become more like God. This means that we can move forward, knowing that, whatever our future holds, some good can come of it.

Though that doesn't mean that we should leave the past completely behind. We can't gain wisdom if we don't learn from the experiences in our past. We should regularly look back at the experiences we've had and the lessons we learned from them, but we shouldn't be too eager to go back into those situations with the intention to stay there. God intends for us to make eternal progress, and to do that, we have to keep moving forward.