by Douglas Brauner

God’s Gift of Pressing On

You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud link.

“Brothers and sisters, I can’t consider myself a winner yet. This is what I do: I don’t look back, I lengthen my stride, and I run straight toward the goal to win the prize that God’s heavenly call offers in Christ Jesus.” 
Philippians 3:13-14 God’s Word to the Nations

For a long time now, I’ve stuffed pictures I’ve taken in the bottom drawer of my desk. I recently cleaned up most of that drawer and put those pictures in a box which also means that I spent time looking at those old pictures. As a result of looking at those pictures, I took out my old Olympus OM-G 35mm film camera, dusted it off, cleaned the lenses, and checked out the price of film.

The nostalgic bug had bitten me.

St. Elmo, Colorado

That nostalgic bug is behind the picture in this blog. I took this picture with my digital camera but I wanted to create the look of a picture taken on a bad 35mm film camera. It’s call the Lomo effect, named after a Russian camera. Each camera had a special, distorted effect on a picture. The pictures taken with these cameras were rarely sharp but they were unique.

When we think about the past we have a tendency to filter out the pain from the past and remember what was good. That doesn’t mean we completely forget the pain but we become selective about what we remember to the point that our nostalgia doesn’t accurately reflect reality.

Instead of longing for the past, something the Israelites did after leaving Egypt, Paul encourages us to press forward to our spectacular future. The taste of that future is greater than the memories of the past. Through Christ we can forget both the failures and successes of the past and look to that day when we will experience the inexplicable joy of the King’s words, “Well done good and faithful servant… Enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:21)

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado