Reframing Your Life With God's PerspectiveSample

Strengthening Your Faith Through the Rear View

For days they lived on the parting of the Red Sea. The picture was etched in their memory in such a way that, for a time, they could think of nothing else. For endless years they had carried the weight of how dark their story had been, and this event changed everything. Now they had a new and fuller story to pass on: a story that began in hardship but ended in glory. They sang about it, memorized it, and repeated every scene—reminding their children and children’s children to pass the story on after they were gone.

However, as months passed, their memory of the Red Sea grew foggy, and the way they remembered the exodus shifted and changed. Like a game of telephone, new phrases slowly began to alter their story. Egypt became a land it never had been, and Moses somehow evolved into a tyrant, forcing them on a journey of hopelessness and despair.

Their hopelessness in the present created a completely inaccurate picture of what their lives looked like when they were suffering as slaves. What happened?

The truth is, it can be a challenge to remember the good when we are traumatized by dark seasons. The difficulties of our past may have left us with some lingering fear, and we can build on that fear when we are in current seasons of struggle. Fear not only has the power to filter what happened in our past; it can prevent us from having faith in present circumstances. If we don’t grab hold of the hope in our past stories, we may even create a bad ending for our future just so we won’t be surprised. This is what happened to the Israelites in the wilderness. They stopped remembering God’s deliverance at the sea and became so afraid to lose their lives that their fears led them into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remembering the hope of our stories could be a more important journey than we thought.

The rear view lens helps us hold on to those stories, and use them as a filter to see our way ahead.

From When Changing Nothing Changes Everything by Laurie Polich Short.