Do you have some bad memories? Embarrassing moments? Anything you'd like to forget?
Maybe it was the time you put both contact lenses into the same eye. Or that day your twin sister forgot your birthday. No! I hate when that happens. Or you woke up from a sound sleep screaming because your braces were stuck together. And you were in the front row of church at the time? Ha!
Perhaps you'd like to renenber the time you showed up for work and were greeted by Anderson Cooper of CNN. That is never a good sign. Or the time you woke up and found your waterbed had sprung a leak . . . and you didn't even have a waterbed.
Well, we all have memories we'd like to forget, don't we?
Where I live, we would like to forget this past winter, when the temperature dipped to 45 below zero. "But," someone said, "at least it was a dry cold."
There are just three benefits to such cold: 1) It can only get warmer. 2) Politicians finally have their hands in their own pockets. 3) Teenagers walk past with their pants hiked all the way up.
Each year, New Yorkers gather in Times Square to celebrate Good Riddance Day. They list unpleasant memories of bad days then take a sledgehammer to them, light them on fire, or throw them into an industrial-strength shredder. Out with the bad year, in with the good. On this year's lists were, "Poverty." "Recession." "Cancer." "Debt." "My boss." "Bad coffee." One wrote, "My sister-in-law."
Good Riddance Day is inspired by a Latin American tradition in which people stuff dolls with objects representing bad memories then light them on fire.
Maybe you too are haunted by memories, by things you'd love to forget. Maybe you've written them down and set them on fire, but still they haunt you. Surely the key involves supernatural forgiveness of others, seeking reconciliation where possible, and handing our regrets and mistakes over to God, who can work new things in us. And behind it all must be the realization that we can't move forward focused on the rear view mirror: "This one thing I do," said Paul in Philippians 3, "Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God's heavenly call in Christ Jesus."
Psalm 103 offers more than a good riddance party for unpleasant memories. It reminds us that God himself has bid good riddance to our sins. "As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our transgressions from us." That is the best news on the planet.
When those memories arrive, press on by focusing on redemption, on the hope we have, on the heavenly call God has placed on your life. And remember what Corrie Ten Boom said, "God buries our sins in the depths of the sea and then puts up a sign that reads, "No fishing."
Phil Callaway is speaker and the author of the popular Adventures of Jake stories for kids. Visit him at philcallaway.com.
