In the Headlights

We usually finished our evening sessions around 10:00.  I was enjoying my first youth camp with the teens and pastor from our church.

(Let me just pause for a quick moment and explain something to you.  Everyone worries about getting old – doesn’t want to do it.  Let me tell you, there is nothing like it!  It’s liberating, and not only do you not worry about embarrassing yourself, you actually thrive on it!  But best of all, on your sixtieth birthday, you receive a “get out of jail free” card.  More to the point, an old lady card.  This card has gotten me out of moving furniture, helping with any chore that involves actually sitting on the floor, and pretty much anything else I choose to use it for.)

So for the four nights of youth camp, I played the old lady card and insisted on preferring my nice pillowy mattress at home to the perfectly lovely, hard and noisy ones at the camp.  

Every night found me driving eight or so miles to my house in the country from the camp even deeper in the country.  There were no neon signs and no street lights to clarify what I was seeing in the rear-view mirror.  In fact, what I mostly saw – or didn’t see – was pitch black nothingness.  So after I passed the occasional car or country store, the lights in the mirror seemed distorted – too high, too low, never completely reliable.

When I remember things that have happened in my past, I’m pretty sure my view is distorted there too.  Some details delight me because I idealize some memory and block out any unpleasantness or stress.  Not a good thing if that becomes a model by which I’ll judge future occurrences like holiday celebrations or goals set.

Or I become depressed remembering only the bad.  I can become consumed with guilt over things I said and shouldn’t have, things I didn’t do but should have, hurt over some slight that I’ve blown out of proportion – you get the idea. 

Paul gave us some good advice in Philippians 3:12-14:  “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

When my eyes are on God, doing whatever it is that He has asked for that day or even for the next ten minutes, I am focused on Him – I am living in the moment, but working toward the prize.  And that’s something I can depend on.  My headlights are stronger than my taillights, anyway.