Kierkegaard once wrote: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” To be more accurate, this is a summary of a journal entry he wrote. The idea is quite simple. We can only really understand our lives by looking back at what happened. Events, challenges, choices, difficulties, losses, and everything else must be experienced day to day. The challenge is that in the moment, we lack the proper context to find meaning in our experiences or to make sense of them. The challenge is that we can only live moving forward. This means that we wind up doing the best we can to live meaningful lives now, but can only look back on the past to figure out why anything that happened to us had meaning. It sounds a little confusing, but makes sense when you begin to look at it in the context of actual events in our lives.
One of the best examples from my own life was the first professional church jobs I had. I was a youth pastor at a church in Northern Indiana 25 years ago. Over time, that church experienced all kinds of struggle and decline due to infighting within the congregation. I loved the people there and went through years of discouragement as people broke relationships and walked away over and over. Eventually, I had to take a second job to support myself. The church was struggling financially, and I had to take a pay cut. I recall being very discouraged because I was quite successful in my role, having grown the youth ministry larger than the church. My second job to make ends meet was at the children’s home. Eventually, I became the chaplain there, and the course of my life was changed dramatically. In the long run, I can see how God worked through all of the difficult stuff that took place to teach me hard lessons about ministry, to mature me as a believer, to teach me how to depend on Him more, and to bring me into a new kind of ministry work. All along the way God was setting the path I was supposed to walk. He was teaching me. Ultimately, he was giving me experiences that I have applied in my work ever since. All of those things are what I can see looking backwards. At the time, in the middle of it all, I was miserable. The experiences were confusing and quite painful. Now, I can look back and say I wouldn’t trade those miserable days for anything because God was using them to reshape me. It only makes sense looking backwards, but had to be experienced head on.
I would argue that the only way to overcome this unusual challenge that is built into the human experience is through faith. I trust God to use my life for His purposes and I trust His plan for my life is aimed at drawing me closer to himself. If I have faith in that truth, then I can face today, with its challenges and uncertainties, assured that He has a plan and is in control. Even better, as I look back and try to understand what has happened, knowing God is the master key for understanding what has happened. He gives me understanding I cannot gain on my own. Therefore, I face today and tomorrow knowing that God will continue to be faithful. Even if today and tomorrow are hard, I can trust he knows what He is doing.
