By Danny Minton

I recently watched the movie “An American Christmas Carol,” with the main character named Benedict Slade (aka. Scrooge). In one scene, he observes an old love he had turned away years before. Now, she was spending Christmas morning with her husband and child, a child that resembled the young love Slade had left. His face and eyes show a feeling of deep sadness as he comments how he could have had a child “If things had been different.”

The Spirit of Christmas Present answers him, “If. That word can be found in dry riverbeds and on trails long overgrown by weeds. What’s more important is the path we follow now.”

Have you ever thought it would be nice to go back in the past and change a decision you made? Have you had thoughts about how things could have been different if you had done something different? Maybe life would have been easier if you had said “yes” instead of “no” or vice versa. Who among us wouldn’t like to go back and correct a mistake or, better yet, not make it at all? We all have felt that there were times when we failed to act when we sat around and did nothing. 

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to change the past. We can correct some wrongs or mistakes or express remorse, but nothing can change our initial response. As the Spirit of Christmas Present stated, those paths are long past grown over and cannot be traveled again. What is important is what we do today. 

Paul tells the Corinthians that God had given him a thorn in his side to keep him from, as “The Message” says, getting the big head over what he was doing. Several ideas concerning the thorn that Paul was given have been given. I have often thought of the possibility that one thorn he had was the knowledge of how he persecuted Christians before the Lord came to him. Paul could not go back and change that, and the guilt had to eat at him. Preaching the Gospel did not change what he had done, but now he chose to move forward with Christ instead of against Him.

On July 21, 1961, Gus Grissom made the second sub-orbital flight of the U.S. space program aboard Liberty Bell 7. While the helicopter hovered about the capsule, preparing to lock a cable to its top to stabilize it, the hatch prematurely blew, allowing water to enter and eventually sink the spacecraft. Although Grissom said the hatch “Just Blew,” it became common for people to claim that he got scared and prematurely blew it before the copter stabilized everything. Grissom could do nothing to change what happened or how people felt. His next flight would be aboard Gemini 3. He named the craft “Molly Brown,” after a current Broadway musical, “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” NASA asked him to change the name, and his response was, “How about the Titanic?” The name remained “Molly Brown.” When he and fellow astronaut John Young landed in the ocean in March of 1965, they decided to stay in the capsule, which was not intended to be a boat, for thirty minutes instead of blowing the hatch. Gus couldn’t change how people felt about his first trip but made sure they knew he was not afraid to stay in the craft.

As the Spirit of Christmas Present said, “What’s more important is the path we follow now.” We need to learn to put the past behind us and decide what we can do from now on to bring glory and praise to God. We are in a race to reach the world with the Gospel of Christ. To win, we must keep looking forward. One of the biggest mistakes a runner can make is to keep looking back. It slows him down, sometimes just enough to allow someone to pass him. We learn from the past, but we should never let past mistakes or failures keep us from moving forward.

There are and will always be a lot of “ifs” that grace our lives. They come with moving forward in life. Looking back through our past, we realize each decision takes us along a different path; some bring sadness and hurt, while others bring joy and hope. No matter what has happened in your past, always remember to live life for today and what you can do to make it better for both you and others. 

We should never forget one important “if” in our lives. It’s found in the book of James. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.’” James 4:13-15 (NASB) 

Danny Minton is a former Elder and minister at Southern Hills Church of Christ