It is not good to get lost in the past. So many of us regret the past and fear the future which means we are not living in the moment. The key to spiritual maturity, peace, happiness, and joy is to live in awareness, to be conscious of where we are and what we are doing.
We cannot do that if we are possessed or obsessed with the past thinking what was, what could have been, what we should have done, our mistakes, our failures, our falls, our embarrassments. If you are living in the grace of God and his forgiveness all that does not matter, the past is gone, and the future is not here, so we are left with the present, the very moment in which we are living, at the very point of our taking a breath.
It is in that breath that we are. It is in the breath the Christ is. Christ is not where you were nor is he where you will be. Christ deals with who you are and what you are doing now. The difference between God’s forgiveness and our forgiveness is God forgets. We in humanity tend not to do that and therein lies our problems.
So in pondering forgiving and forgetting, I thank God to where he has brought me concerning this matter. I no longer interact with the forgetfulness needed to avoid the past or the anticipation of the future. Now I am not stating that regretting the past and fearing the future does not come up, for sure it comes at me, but as soon as it does, I throw it to the foot of the cross and let Christ deal with it. I have taken up too much of my life engaging in thoughts of the past or the future, and through the grace of God, I have learned to live in the moment. That is where I want to be. That is where I am the most useful to myself, my family and God be present in the moment and that is where God will find me when he takes me home, “In the moment.”