Looking backward, looking forward

Yesterday I celebrated my 65th birthday���the usual surprise, how could this have happened to me?���and this morning Popie and I listened to Pray As You Go for morning devotions. The Scripture was Jeremiah 7: 23-24, which (in the NRSV translation) says of Israel, ���They did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward.���

It was the ���looking backward��� that caught my ear. These days I am aware of the temptation to believe (as the Israelites tended to do) that the best is behind me; that the future is full of stresses and strains that may build my character but won���t amount to anything substantial. At 65 there is a tendency to look backward with nostalgia and forward with your guard up.

But that is not a view that God endorses. The stance of the Christian is always forward, learning from the past only in order to lean toward the future. And according to Jeremiah, there is a moral component to this.

To put a point on it, the 4-mile run from my front door, which I���ve been doing for at least 20 years, gets a little slower every year, no matter how hard I train.

But there is more to life than my body–and even that, I���m told, will be renewed.