I decided to write some articles for Bloganuary, an annual blogging start of year encouragement on WordPress.com

Today’s prompt: Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

As a pastor, I spend a significant amount of time thinking about the future. God gives us dreams and visions about how our lives as individuals and as a community of faith might develop over the years ahead.

To do this, I need to think about the past also. How does my past inform my future plans? What has worked or hindered the vision in the past.

In another sense, I have to think about the past whenever I read the Scriptures. The are God’s living words to His people right now. How do I reach into an ancient culture to understand the followers of Jesus in order to bring their experience into the present?

The Biblical understanding of “remembering” was very different to ours. When Jesus tells us to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in memory of Him, He is not just telling us to act out an event that happened two thousand years ago. Similarly when the Jews celebrated Passover, it was not just about ancient history. To remember means that we bring the events of the past into the present and allow them to transform us now.

Past, present and future all impinge equally in our lives. But then there is eternity, where time takes on a very different meaning. Followers of Jesus will live forever in a perfect, reconstructed heavens and earth. That seems like the far future, but really it isn’t that far from us.

Any one of us could die in the next 24 hours and find ourselves in the presence of God. Then all of our earthly lives will be past tense. We will be asked to give an account of our lives. Those who faithfully followed Jesus will be brought into heaven, while those who rejected Him will be “cast into the outer darkness.”