I apologize this should have preceded yesterdays post. . .
Jerry Sittser, a pastor and author of “The Will of God as a Way of Life” shares some deeply personal thoughts from his life, and then with the above title continues . . . . Closing his chapter 8, ‘Facing What We Cannot Change’
There is nothing we can do to change our past. It is as hard as granite, as immovable as a mountain. What is done is done. Regret, bitterness, revenge—none of these can alter what has already happened. No matter how many times we say “if only,” regret cannot alter the past. No matter how bitterly we brood, blame, and accuse, the wrong done to us will remain as it is. No matter how often we rehearse a plot of revenge, we will never be able to reverse the course of events that created our pain in the first place. Regret, bitterness, revenge will only ruin us. We will become prisoners in our own dark souls, suffocated by our own dark brooding thoughts.
Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain, traces the Civil War journey of Inman, an Injured deserter, who wants to return to his beloved Cold Mountain and the woman who awaits him there. He endures profound suffering along the way, but realizes at the same time that obsessive grief and bitterness will leave him worse off than before. “You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damaged done therein. For the dead and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were.”
Inman knows that grief and bitterness can keep a person stuck in the past. He believes that, however severe the grief, “all your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only scars to mark the void. All you can chose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”7
Somehow, as Inman suggest, we must learn to move on regardless of the severity of pain in the past. We cannot change what has happened. Still we do have power within our grasp—we can trust God to redeem the past. To this topic I turn in the next chapter. ~Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000,2004)p.119
