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Jesus taught his followers to "face forward" and not be bound by the past. (Shutterstock Photo)
Special to United Methodist Insight | Feb. 11, 2026
What happened ten minutes ago is in the past. It is as much in the past as what happened ten years ago. As much in the past as ten thousand years ago. As much in the past as ten million years ago.
To live in this awareness, minute by minute, day by day, is to live facing forward. Of course the past matters to us. Ten minutes ago and ten years ago may matter to us a lot. But if we really get it through our heads and our hearts that the past is the past, and that there’s no going back to it, then we can live a lot more fully in the moment. We can face forward and embrace who and what is right in front of us.
But the past has a way of sticking to us, and us sticking to it. So often we find ourselves dragging the anchor of the past with us, slowing us down.
From Matthew 22: A scribe then approached and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another of his disciples said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
All well and good for Jesus to say that, but – have you ever served as the executor of an estate? What a bunch of work – picking up the pieces of a person’s past, sorting out their stuff, unraveling their finances, re-raveling them into estate accounts, then unraveling them again to distribute them, hoping, praying that there will be an end to the process. Thinking it is all in the past, then getting another bill or notice that you have to deal with. If only the dead could bury the labyrinth of the affairs they left behind… Jesus’ words can ring hollow to those of us who have served as executors!
I’d like to think that these words attributed to Jesus were figurative. But who knows for sure? Those words come from the dim past. In any case, it seems certain that he was making a point about looking forward rather than back, living fully in the present rather than dragging the anchor of the past. In his Sermon on the Mount, he told people to be birdlike and barnless, trusting that their needs would be met in the moment. He told his followers to go forth and do ministry without carrying any baggage, trusting that their needs would be met day by day. When he confronted people who had somehow sinned, he didn’t beat them up about their past, but rather told them to go forth and sin no more.
For Jesus, there was only one direction, and that was forward.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had, and am still having, with young people who are exasperated with online dating. They pour out their souls to me about one after another dreadful encounter they end up having with people they met on an online dating site, people who checked off most of the boxes of their preferences, but upon meeting them, they turn out to be utterly inappropriate. Or they meet up with someone who seems perfect, and they start dating, and then out of nowhere they get ghosted by them, or some enormous red flag starts waving and they have to call it off.
It is useless – and certainly not forward-facing – for me to tell them that back in my day, there was no internet, and no way to search for a partner except random chance encounters or blind dates, and that I would have saved years of frustration if online dating services were available. So the only advice I have for them is to face forward. All those dud dates are in the past. They’re all in the same tar pit of yesterday as the saber-tooth tiger. Release your focus on them. The only direction to face is ahead. Keep going, keep dating, and trust that somewhere out there you will find Mr. or Ms. right. On the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago there is a colorful phrase to express this: every bread has its cheese!
St Paul wrote: “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
Facing forward, we aim toward the unknown and unknowable. We might assume we know what’s ahead, but in actual fact we can’t be sure. Too often we assume the future is going to be a continuation of the past.
I was hiking this week up Horn Canyon above Ojai. My destination was a swimming hole in the creek along the trail up the mountain. I arrived at the turnout in the trail where the pool of water had been the last time I hiked up there, but the swimming hole was gone. There was no water there at all. It was just a scoured-out channel of dry stones and boulders. A winter storm had blown out the wall of rock that formed the swimming hole. And then the roaring rush of water down the mountain scoured out a new channel for the creek – a hundred yards away.
The predictable channels through which events flowed in the past can be abandoned suddenly and be replaced by new ones. It takes spiritual discipline to face forward, to be ready to go with a new flow, to recognize that hope that is seen is not hope, and to know that our souls can face uncertainty with equanimity.