The Good Old Days

 

“I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

—Philippians 3:14

“Ah! The good old days! Things aren’t the same any more, laddie. When I was a boy, why we knew what hard work was. No one gave us a handout. We earned our keep, or we went hungry.”

Mr. MacPherson was a most interesting man. He supervised the late night cleaning crew at the insurance company where I worked for 30 years.

On occasion, when I was working on a difficult problem and felt I needed extreme quiet in order to concentrate, I would return to the office in the wee hours of the morning. It was on one of these occasions when Mr. Mac, as he liked to be called, laid out his philosophy of life.

“God gave me a new beginning, don’t ya know,” he told me. “I had got me self into a fair bind, I did. But God took pity on me and sent a wee lass from God’s Army. She showed me great kindness, that she did.

“I started to go to meetings and God fair squeezed His love into my heart. The Lord Jesus became me Savior. Yes, He did.”

As I listened to Mr. Mac’s brief telling of his conversion at that long-ago Salvation Army meeting, a “light” went on inside my head. Here was a man giving witness to the life-transforming power of God’s love. And, all he did to present a powerful witness was to simply tell me his story.

Sometimes we get mired in the past. We wish we could return to former times when things seemed so much better. We long for the good old days.

Mr. Mac did not let the past hold him in its sway. But, he did celebrate the past for what it really represented in his life: a new beginning.

The Apostle Paul wrote his perspective on the past in his letter to the Christians in the church at Philippi, as recorded in Philippians 3:13b-14:

…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.

We can give the past a proper perspective. We can celebrate what God has done in our past without becoming anchored to the past.

We can tell our story and share with others what God has done in our lives. That’s a proper and positive and helpful use of our past.

 

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