THE OTHER DAY

That's my comment for those crossroad moments when life suddenly produces a flashback and you look at the experience by seeing the past in a different reflection. It is an encounter that can touch in some many ways with a retrospect quality, providing one is willing to look back and see it with a new light.

What I find interesting are the people who insist upon coloring the past in some deception. They never want to see any of the flaws as they were. Instead they always use the rationale that if things turned out okay, they things weren't as bad as they seemed.

Parents can at times be the biggest violators of this practice. That is when they look at their adult kids and decide because the child didn't turn out to be a murderer or in prison that they did a good job as a parent. But if you ask the child, they have painful scars from their childhood that never healed and they have managed to cope, but they are hardly feeling that everything worked out okay.

That is where the other day moments can be so important. The person can if they are prone to a pattern of hopeless denial end up never allowing those other day events to truly create the benefit as intended.

I believe that other day experiences are like any other aspect of human experience. God's spirit can use them to help guide us spiritual to a point of understanding. It can enrich our sense of forgiveness and grace and also see another facet of life that we need to deal with differently than just ignoring.

Still, the mind can and does resist the times when this is essential if we just can't accept what is before us as a reflection. I don't see this as a way it impacts us in terms of our salvation, but it can certainly diminish our capacity for the kind of depth or understanding and relationship with the Lord that we should have. We can deprive ourselves of so much in terms of seeing the Lord in an ever growing insight.

Passing beyond the pillars of the known is to travel by faith. It also means from time to time looking back. Not for the sake of punishment, but for the sake of clarity.

But if we hesitate too long then the sands of time can shift and what we see is no longer the truth. Or we may simply never look in the first place or long enough to know what kind of journey we truly took.

I'm grateful for the other day experiences. They can help guide unlike any others. We can rejoice and feel a joy for how the Lord's spirit will bless and touch our lives with a knowledge that our pride might otherwise deny us.

For some that trip will always be one they can celebrate. For others there will only be silence in the heart since they will never be willing to look and see what is there. Sad it is when they don't do this and are robbed of the greater blessing. But at times they will never truly see it as the blessing it is.