If Again... Yet No More...

Tomorrow we leave for Indianapolis. We are excited to make the trip and to be with a long time friend on his wedding day. Even in my excitement to go back to one of my many hometowns, I have a bit of a question or notion that this trip will also carry with it disenchantment. There is such the tendency in humanity to memorialize the past and leave out everything the past lacked - as the discontented humans we are and can be.

I wonder how many of my fond memories of today will be put in their proper context of yesterday? Was it actually as great as I recall it to be? As adults going back to once enormous play-places we find them now oddly small. Being just as human then as now, however, the struggles I had then are the same as the struggles I have today yet something makes us long for times ago. Although, then I had more slimmer spiritual-maturity-material working within me than I do now, we still long for those days.

I go back now ten years later, beautifully married and with four children. I go back changed by time and turmoil, but with also wisdom that God has continued to give me each day since as I further learn to trust Him. I too must think of those days fondly as I was an adventurous adolescent always venturing some romance or its woes. Emotionally, it was a charged time vibrant with an energy of expectancy of what may come of this life. Now I meet those places of my adolescence with a bit of the curtain unfurled and a sort of settled knowing of how things I once wondered did become. I do not return as a teen but as a thirty-something with whom a bit of the magic of what could be removed by what actually is.