What Once Was.

Do you ever get caught up in the "what once was" of life?
Maybe it's the impending Fall time (my favorite time of year), or maybe it's how I am amazed by how life just keeps ticking by with no relenting, or maybe it's the fact that I have found the old show Home Improvement on Youtube and have been watching that while I work on projects lately.
Whatever the culprit is, my mind has been in the throes of looking longingly into the rear view mirror and thinking, "Oh man....those were the good days."
It's the age-old thing to do, I know. As humans we are easily tempted to look backwards and think of "better times" and long for the "what once was" seasons of our life.

As I type this I am reminded of one day when I was a girl (and I even remember that I was in some pioneer-esque long skirt and a sweatshirt), it must have been October for the chill was in the air and the ground was already freezing cold, and I was making the first cake I ever made. I think it was from a box, so don't be too impressed. But for whatever reason (probably to throw the egg shells in the garbage pile outside), I put the cake in the oven and ran outside to dispose of the kitchen waste.
I ran outside barefoot (because that's what little country kids do), and I distinctly remember how icey solid cold the ground was. The wind was whipping my face and skirt, and off in the distance I could hear the gentle hum of a grain dryer. All the farmers had been working like ants to get the crops in and then when it comes out of the field they have to dry it.
And right then and there, with the far-off sound of a grain dryer, the chill in the air, and the cold hard ground beneath my feet, one of my favorite childhood memories was born. To this day the sound of those grain dryers is my favorite of all sounds.
So why then, almost two decades later, do I sit here today, a married woman, living hours away in a city, and pine for those days?

Maybe it is intrinsic in my familial nature. When I was a kid my mom got a series of books called "The Good Old Days" which were collections of stories that people sent in about their life during the Great Depression. Even then I was caught up in THEIR nostalgia, being regaled by their tales, but I knew instinctively even then that life definitely was simpler back in "those days."

Days that weren't even mine.

Or maybe I am just tired.

Do you ever get tired of all you feel you have to do? And I am not talking about the laundry list of chores we all have. 1930, 1990, or 2015, we all still have chores. No, no. But how about these new things we feel we have to do?
Like check our Facebook? Or someone's Instagram? Or read someone's blog?
Are we doing it so that if they ask "Oh hey, did you see my kid lost their tooth?" we don't have to come back at them with the only other possible response, "Oh no, sorry. I didn't go to a website to be informed about your life."

But I feel a sense of guilt if I don't keep up.

So I add it to the laundry list.

And I think that is what I am missing these days. I am missing the ability my life had in the 90's to use ignorance as an alibi. I am missing what seem to me to be "simpler times." Where there were not voices speaking to me from every single angle and every single device in my house.

Because truth be told, I typically don't like what I hear coming from those devices, either. I don't like how every issue is now public, or how every catastrophe is now everyone else's catastrophe, too, or how if I don't "like" someone's joy then they think I seriously don't like them anymore.

But I want to catch myself in this. Because I know I have a tendency to think back to the "good old days" and think of them as better, or somehow less sinful even.....

And so I have been contemplating this.

Human beings are sinners. We sin, because we are sinners. Not the other way around.
Every little itty bitty baby and every serial killer, if given a percentage of sinful, would read 100%. Our quota is all full.
But here is what I do know. Sin gives birth to more sin. One sin leads to another. That which you sow is that which you will reap.
So while we are full-up on our sinfulness, we absolutely can SIN MORE.
And maybe it doesn't matter, because it doesn't change the 100% and therefore the only two optional eternity residences, but I think that is what causes us to look back at "the good old days" and pine for them. We somehow feel like people were committing less sin back then.

And maybe they were. That's a hard thing to judge.

Or maybe the real truth of it is that our sin wasn't so public and so "liked" and so "followed" back then, so it seems like there was less and less of it.

For good or bad, that is what technology has done: It has made us aware of so much more stuff.

But the problem is, now that I am so much more aware of so many more people's sin (more and more), it has made me really skeptical.
And it has made me miss the past. And loathe the imagined future.
And to be honest, it has made me lose sight of RIGHT NOW. Which is why I want to go backwards. Because it seems better there ("less sinful"),  and the future terrifies me stupid.

Which, might I add, is exactly where the devil wants me.

In The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis talks about this:

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present - either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure."

Today is what we have. Today is where the Lord wants to meet us. Today is where we can reach our world and feed our families and love our neighbors.
And just a thought: If you need to get off the internet to get back in touch with RIGHT NOW----then do it.

Love you, Wolfies.