Running Backwards

Why is the past more comfortable than the future? Let’s be honest, it’s a whole lot easier to run to something familiar than take steps into the unknown. At least we know what to expect, right?

It looks different for everyone, but we all have those things, those people, those habits, that we go back to over and over again because they are familiar.

The Israelites wanted to do the same thing. God had set them free and yet what did they want to do the moment they were stuck between a rock and a hard place, or rather the unknown future and the familiar past; what did they want to do when pressed? Go back and be slaves, at least they knew what each day held?

I remember one night sitting in my new apartments in Florida, and all I wanted to do was go back home.

At least I knew what to expect back home. Home was familiar. As much as I wanted to be on my own, and I loved were I was living, I longed for the familiar. But, in the quite of the night I heard the Lord whisper, “If you keep trying to go back to or stay  in what’s comfortable you’ll miss seeing God part the Red Sea!!”

 The Israelites would have rather gone back to a life of slavery than walk into the unknown with God. How often do we do the same thing? But oh, what they would have missed out on if they had gone back—the same goes for us.

God wants to do a new thing in our lives, but He can’t if all we are doing in longing for what is behind us.

I’ve shared a similar story, but it’s about Lot’s wife. God’s instructions were for them to leave and not look back. The moment Lot’s wife looked back she turned into salt. The Lord so stunned me for weeks with the simple verse, “She turned around and turned into a pillars of salt.”

She couldn’t go forward and she could go back.

That’s what we do when we keep continue to pursue what was, what could have been, instead of keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus and were he is leading us.

We all struggle with this in one way or another, we’ll miss what’s ahead if we keep trying to chase or relive what was in the past.