So I spent last week at my parent’s house in Virginia. My mom has Alzheimer's so I have been trying to get up a little more often. My parents live on a lake so a typical day starts at about 6:30 AM with a little fishing. I usually get back around 9:00 for breakfast followed by a nap. After dinner it’s back on the lake again for a little more fishing. Then I wake up the next morning and do it all again. Hey, it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Over the years I have occasionally noticed a retired guy out on the lake rowing a boat up and down the lake. To be an effective rower, you sit with your back to the direction you are going and pull hard on the oars. Since he couldn’t actually see where he’s going, every once in a while, the guy would glance over his shoulder to get his bearing, but for the most part his view was of where he had already been.
I know people who live their lives in the same way; occasionally looking towards the future, but primarily focusing on where they had been. Their past failures and poor choices have somehow paralyzed them and prevented them from seeing opportunities in the future. It seems to me that if you live your life like that, always looking in the past, you miss a lot. You miss out on opportunities, you miss out on relationships, and if you’re not careful, you might just run into something that will sink your boat.
On one of those days while I was watching my rowing friend, about one hundred yards ahead of him, I saw a guy in a kayak. Unlike rowers, kayakers face the direction they are going and focus on what’s ahead, not what’s behind them. I couldn’t help but think, on the lake of life I want to be a kayaker not a rower. I mean, let’s be honest, we have all failed in the past, we’ve all said things we regret, we’ve all messed up relationships, but do we have to be paralyzed by them? Are we just prisoners of our past? Not me, I choose to live like a kayaker.
I used to have a poster in my classroom that said, “This is a safe place to make a mistake, but hopefully you will make a different one each time.” Now, I want to learn from my mistakes and not keeping making the same ones; I just don’t want to live them over and over again in my mind. If God can forgive us of our mistakes and put them in our past, why can’t you and I?
So in the words of that great theologian from The Lion King, Pumbaa, “You got to put your behind in your past.”
Be a kayaker.
I know people who live their lives in the same way; occasionally looking towards the future, but primarily focusing on where they had been. Their past failures and poor choices have somehow paralyzed them and prevented them from seeing opportunities in the future. It seems to me that if you live your life like that, always looking in the past, you miss a lot. You miss out on opportunities, you miss out on relationships, and if you’re not careful, you might just run into something that will sink your boat.
On one of those days while I was watching my rowing friend, about one hundred yards ahead of him, I saw a guy in a kayak. Unlike rowers, kayakers face the direction they are going and focus on what’s ahead, not what’s behind them. I couldn’t help but think, on the lake of life I want to be a kayaker not a rower. I mean, let’s be honest, we have all failed in the past, we’ve all said things we regret, we’ve all messed up relationships, but do we have to be paralyzed by them? Are we just prisoners of our past? Not me, I choose to live like a kayaker.
I used to have a poster in my classroom that said, “This is a safe place to make a mistake, but hopefully you will make a different one each time.” Now, I want to learn from my mistakes and not keeping making the same ones; I just don’t want to live them over and over again in my mind. If God can forgive us of our mistakes and put them in our past, why can’t you and I?
So in the words of that great theologian from The Lion King, Pumbaa, “You got to put your behind in your past.”
Be a kayaker.
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