Remembering Without Returning

As I write this, I am sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop in Florida, where I used to retreat when I was a pastor of a church just a few minutes away.   

I wrote many a sermon in the same seat I am sitting in at the moment.  I met with parishioners, colleagues, and friends here.  I was here on the day that it opened, some fifteen years ago.  

My life was different then.  My youngest son had just been born, my oldest was sixteen years old, playing football for the school my youngest now attends, and my middle son was in first grade. 

While the surroundings of this coffee shop have changed due to growth and development, it's a strange feeling to sit here once again.  

As I've been pondering all of this, I came across an interesting quote from aviator, adventurer, and author Beryl Markham (a female aviator who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic from England to North America):  

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

I must admit, it's quite a shocking quote when you first read it.  But I get it. Our memories are simply constructs of our past, full of our own implicit bias and often remembered by others who shared them with us in completely different ways.  

Which is why we ought to recall them with care and tenderness, and not with an incessant yearning to return to them.  Nostalgia is a powerful current. Memories—weddings and births, hard-won victories, even losses that taught us to breathe again—can steady us like stones across a river. 

But when we elevate the past into a destination, the same memories that once guided us can begin to hold us back. 

The novelist Milan Kundera once wrote: 

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

Longing to go back can become a subtle sorrow that stalls us in place, turning yesterday into an idol and today into a waiting room.

Scripture gives us a wiser footing. The preacher warns, “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). Isaiah hears God say, “Do not remember the former things… See, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18–19). 

Jesus is tender with our histories yet firm with our direction: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). Even Paul, whose past held both brilliance and shame, chooses not to camp there: “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal” (Philippians 3:13–14).

This is not amnesia. 

Holy remembrance is gratitude that propels, not gravity that drags. We can bless what was without binding ourselves to it. We can grieve what hurt without rehearsing it into our identity. The gospel invites us to hold memory in one hand and promise in the other, letting hope set the pace.

So cherish your stories; let them teach and tenderize you. But keep your face toward the horizon. God is not only the Lord of your past; God is already in your future, making a way. Today is not a lesser echo of what was; it is the next canvas of grace.

Prayer

God of our yesterdays and tomorrows, thank you for the gifts and lessons of my past. Free me from clinging to what was, and open my heart to what you are doing now. Help me remember with gratitude, release with trust, and walk forward with hope, knowing you go before me. Amen.

Reflection Questions

1. Where am I idealizing “the way it used to be” in a way that keeps me from faithful risk today?

2. Which memories—joyful or painful—need to be reframed as testimonies that propel me forward?

3. What concrete step can I take this week that aligns with the “new thing” God is growing in me?