Falling Into the Future

My sister called me yesterday to explore our common memories of childhood. Evidently, she is reading a book by Beth Moore entitled Believing God, and she was working on a memory grid, dividing her memories into ten year periods. Since Judy is nearly to the biblical three score and ten year period of her life, she will have almost seven grids of memories. The whole experience of delving into memories reminds me again of the book Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry that I just completed reading. The narrator makes the following observation early on in the novel:

"When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you don't know it."

I love the way this passage communicates a sense of time, both past and current. In the case of the narrator, her husband Virgil is to go missing in action in World War II shortly after they were married.

I guess we would all, if we are honest, like to have a view of the future when we are young. Judy related to me that one of her early memories was of our father who, one night for a joke on our mother, put on her pink nightgown to make everyone laugh. Judy reports that I laughed and laughed. I appreciated her memory because I have no memory of the incident myself. I often regret that all of my memories of my father are negative--including many drunken scenes throughout my teen and young adult years. As a small child, when I was laughing at him wearing mother's gown, I had no idea of what the future would hold for me: divorce of my parents, my mother dissolving more and more into clinical depression as the years went along, moving into my grandmother's home for five years as a teenager, and so on.

On the other hand, perhaps God has planned life best by not giving us a glimpse of the future, both good and bad. That way we can retain hope for a life beyond what we are currently living and fall into the future with more confidence.