Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, “The Go-Between,” opens with these words: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
As we approach the end of another calendar year, our tendency is to gaze backward and analyze the time that was, if only briefly. That’s fine. As another writer has said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
There’s benefit in going back and “watching the game film” like an old football coach, seeing what we did well and what we need to work on.
But I hear a caution in Hartley’s memorable line: You can’t live there anymore, in the past. You’ll find that it’s not your home. Things change, and now it’s just weird over there.
Time itself can be the wineskins Jesus spoke about in his parable. The old wineskin becomes dry and inflexible, no longer able to deal with the challenge of new wine. The new wineskin is supple enough to accommodate the pressure of fermentation, pressure that would burst the old model.
If you linger too long in the past, today and tomorrow are going to stress your seams, your stitching, in dangerous ways.
They may well destroy you. Past disappointments set us up for a present knocking down.
My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer last July. Our lives have undergone significant overhaul since then. Now, we look back with some astonishment at how we lived at the beginning of the year. It seems … foreign, like a strange country we once visited.
Though we trust in God and believe that all will be well, that place we used to live is gone. There is a sense of loss in that realization, maybe even mourning. That older wineskin has burst, and the wine is lost.
Today, however, is a new wineskin, freshly crafted and ready to be filled. That dawning light you see on the horizon — that’s 2025, and no one knows what that year’s vintage will taste like.
In the world that God made, we have to keep moving forward. We can’t stay here, because this will turn into the past. It will quickly be foreign and inhospitable. It will house some good memories but won’t let us live there.
This concept is also taught in 1 Corinthians 3:21-22: “All things are yours … the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours.”
Paul omitted something significant there. You may have missed it. All things, including the present and future. Not the past, though. The past is not yours. You don’t get to live there. Momentary visits are fine, but there’s no room for rent.
The past belongs to God. He promises to bring all things into remembrance on Judgment Day. Every past wrong will be righted, every crooked injustice set straight. The Lord Jesus will wipe away every tear from grieving eyes.
He’s given you today especially, along with the ability to gaze forward just a bit and plan for the future. Today, let’s worry about today. Tomorrow will have its own worries in tow. And, Jesus will be the Lord of both those wineskins.
Gordan Runyan is pastor of Tucumcari’s Immanuel Baptist Church and author of “Radical Moses: The Amazing Civil Freedom Built into Ancient Israel.” Contact him at: