I admire a person who can drive a tractor in a straight line, especially in hilly areas. The ground is seldom smooth and it takes a bit of skill to keep the tractor going straight. I remember helping my father-in-law once with the harvest, driving the swather, which we had just repaired. He chided me because my rows weren't straight (it was my first time doing something like this). Crooked lines meant the possibility of having to make an extra run or two across the field, which cost time and money.
 |
| Wheat fields on me father-in-laws farm |
My father-in-law grew different kinds of crops, but in some places there was no fence or anything between them, there was only a marked pole on either end of the field. Aim straight for the pole, and you get a straight line. I could barely see the pole half a mile a way, let alone imagine tracking a straight line across the field to it. And you couldn't let your eyes get distracted-if you turn around and start looking back, the tractor is liable to get off track. It's like what we were taught in driving school: "Where you look you will steer." Or, as we read in Proverbs, "Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you." (Proverbs 4:25 ESV)
So it was in Jesus' day. Someone had told Jesus that he wanted to follow Him, but he told Jesus that he needed to say goodbye to his family first. Jesus told him that a person who looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God.
On the surface, the statement seems a bit harsh, but I can get the point. If we're trying to go forward with Jesus, yet we keep looking back at what we're missing in our old life, we'll get off track, perhaps turned around completely.
The field is ripe and ready to harvest, Jesus said (John 4:35). We need to direct our combine straight across the field.
 |
| Abundant Harvest |
I remember looking back once. It was my mid-life crisis. A lot of guys go through that kind of thing, usually when the're in their forties and they start comparing the life they are living with the life they hoped they'd being living at that point.
I had a mid-life crisis as well. It was a difficult period of my life and I thought about ditching what I was doing and starting over. But my mid-life crisis only lasted about 30 seconds. Because when I looked back—back to my life before I was a believer—I remembered how miserable I was then. Why would I want to go back to that? The present may not have been rosy, but it wasn't that bad.
 |
| Canola Harvest 1987 |
Now we're at the age when we might suffer from nostalgia. They sometimes refer to this as looking back at the "good old days", because we have a tendency to only remember the good times. And there were good times to be sure. It's fun to look at old photos and reminisce. But we don't live there. We rejoice that God allowed us to have those experiences in the past that helped us get to where we are in the present. We were moving forward then and we're moving forward now.
Paul wrote, "12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:12-14 NIV)
