Life Lived in Reverse

Reflections on Luke 17:32

Remember Lot’s Wife.

We moved a lot when I was a kid.  Pittsburgh, Houston, Kansas City and back to Pittsburgh all in the three and half years between sixth grade and the end of the first semester of ninth grade, the prime wonder years.  I was excited to leave the neighborhood I had grown up in in exchange for what my mother promised to be a grand adventure.  Only it never occurred to me how hard adventures could be.  I was shyer than anyone imagined I would be.  I didn’t mix well at my new school, in a new state, in a new neighborhood with no kids my age.  I was miserable and I think I made my parents miserable too.  In six months we were off to Kansas City … another new school, new classmates, and a new neighborhood.  This time I tried a little harder.  The end result was that I was cornered on the playground by a welcome wagon of bullies who promised to make the new kid miserable, and I was, for a time. 

Sixth grade turned to seventh and things got better.  It took awhile, but I made friends, good friends.  In Kansas City my neighborhood was huge and my school friends lived within a short bike ride of my house.  It was the seventies so you didn’t need a play date scheduled by your mom to visit your friends.  My new posse of girlfriends expanded with the onset of puberty to include boys.  On weekends we gathered in rec rooms and basements playing records and dancing to the Bee Gee’s Saturday Night Fever and Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver album.  There was always drama, but it was harmless, junior high, drama …who liked whom and who asked whom to dance.  We passed notes at school and tied up our parent’s phone lines.  My first official boyfriend was the older brother of a member of my posse.  We didn’t talk.  We just slow danced at night and passed notes by day.  I was in love.

Then it was time to move … again.  Chuck and I had finally found each other and my Dad wanted to move us back to Pittsburgh.  I pouted, slammed doors, refused to be pleasant, isolated myself in my room for days, maybe weeks, but we moved anyway.  We packed the Ford Grand Torino Station Wagon and drove east for two days.  I cried the whole way.  I wrote Chuck Gibson all over by white Keds sneakers between sobs.  I was determined to me miserable in Pittsburgh.  And of course I was.

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Jesus would have told me to remember Lot’s wife, just as he reminded the disciples in Luke’s gospel.  Of course that wouldn’t have meant anything to me as a fourteen-year-old.  My Sunday school education was not substantial.  It would be a few years or more before I would become aware of the fate of Lot’s wife as they packed their bags and headed for the hills.   God called them forward, told them it was time to move on, but Lot’s wife looked back.  She lost sight of the present and the promise of the future and instead looked longing over her shoulder and ceased to exist.  She crumbled on the spot.   

I get it.  There is nothing worse than the feeling that the best is over … that the best times have past … that the best love is lost … that the best success has been had … that nothing will compare with days gone by.  There is nothing sadder than the conviction that nothing ahead of you will match what is behind you.  I understand her need to look back.  She wasn’t fleeing bad times.  She was saying goodbye to the good times.  She was leaving behind the home her children grew up in and her own circle of friends.  She was leaving what she knew and heading into the unknown.   Okay, so Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t the ideal location to raise a family, but still so much of her life happened there.  And besides, the minute the present becomes the past it is open to reinterpretation and of course romanticization. 

It is the sin of nostalgia.  Nostalgia comes from the Greek roots meaning homecoming and pain.  It is an ache for the past, often a past that did not exist, at least not as we remember it.  Many of us are prone to selective memory and embellishment that paints the past rosy in comparison to the present.  As a result we move through life not face forward, but with necks stretched back, looking over our shoulders and longing for the good old days.  It is a life lived in reverse, which come to find out is no life at all, if the lesson of Mrs. Lot is to be believed.  She looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

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I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, but I missed out on much of the life that was happening all around me.  I remember little of the end of my ninth grade year and even less of my tenth grade year, because there isn’t much to remember.  I spent the better part of that time mourning what I had left behind … remembering, recasting, projecting a future that would never be.  I was a silly adolescent, but this lesson isn’t just for the young.  It speaks to anyone who believes that the present pales in comparison to the days gone by; who fears that life has little left to offer.  It is a lesson for all who are living life in reverse.  God calls us to face forward.  God gives us life in the present and hope in the future and what is left for the past?  Simply gratitude.

I am about to do a new thing: now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Isaiah 43:19 NRSV