Recently we joined zip.ca, which is the equivalent of Netflix in Canada. You can order DVDs by mail, return them when you're done, and then get your next one. It works out well because you can get all these older titles which are never available in the video store.
Anyway, I decided to order a whole bunch of Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, because they tend to be clean so my girls can watch, and they're cute. And I just finished watching Back When We Were Grownups.
This was not a perfect movie, and it wasn't five stars or anything. But I so enjoyed it, and it raised so many issues about relationships that I just wish that I had had someone to talk to about it! I think I'm going to have to read the book now!
Anyway, I want to talk about a few issues in it. Here's the gist of the story: a woman, now in her mid-50s, is dissatisfied with her life. She's not sure she's appreciated, and she's not sure that her life turned out the way it was supposed to. She really doesn't know who she is anymore.
When she was in her early twenties, she fell madly in love with a man with three daughters whose wife had recently left him. She left the man she had been dating for years, and married this guy. They have another baby girl together, and then he dies in a car accident. She raises his three daughters and their own by herself, keeping his family business going, and caring for her husband's aging uncle.
She holds everybody together. And then suddently that's not enough, and she goes in search of the woman she once was: intellectual, steady, and serious. She looks up the man she used to date, and tries hard to make that relationship work. But in the process she realizes that you can't go back, because she really isn't that person anymore. And she likes who she is now much better.
Her life is full of chaos; she has pictures of all the grandchildren and step-grandchildren on her fridge, along with family friends, including her handyman. She knows everything about everybody's life, and is always helping. Her photo albums are stuffed full. She loves caring for the grandchildren and embracing her daughters' new husbands. The phone rings off the hook.
And this man that she once knew leads the opposite life. Everything is controlled and planned. Everything is orderly. She tries to be like that, but she can't. And in the end, she finds her way home.
It really is a lovely story, and there's so much that touched me. But the one theme that it brought out is that you can't go back--and perhaps we shouldn't. We often dream of what might have been, and this woman had every reason to dream. Her husband had died when he was so young that she'd never had much love in her life. She's had to raise three children that weren't hers, and care for a business and aging relatives that weren't hers either. Imagine if she had not had to take on all these responsibilities at so young an age.
Many of us feel that way at times, don't we? That we should have been someone else. She can look back and see what a promising student she was, but she left that behind for her husband. Maybe you can look back on a career you once had, or an education you once enjoyed, and wonder where you would be now if you had pursued them.
But the movie provides a stark contrast: she likely would have ended up like the control freak she had once dated, and that isn't who she is, either. She loves all the people around her. She loves that they count on her, even if the whole lot of them is completely dysfunctional. And she has changed because they have changed her, and that is a good thing.
Ultimately the life we choose for ourselves becomes our life. That is who we are now. It shapes you. I am a different person because of who I married. I am far more secure, far more outgoing, far more relaxed, and far more go with the flow because of Keith and his big, loud family. If I had married into a staid, upper class family, I likely would be far more uptight and far more worried about etiquette, and china, and what fork one uses at dinner. I had those tendencies when I was young, and I easily could have been pushed in that direction. I used to have season's tickets to the National Ballet of Canada! But that's not who I became.
That's not to say taht we're stuck where we are. The movie certainly doesn't give that impression, because by the end of it her horizons are opening to her. But they're opening forward, not backwards. They're growing on what she's become, they're not denying it so that she can become someone different.
I think it's an interesting exercise to think about how our families today, and the choices we've made, have shaped us. When I look back on some of the other men I dated, I can easily see myself being a very different person had I stuck with them. And I am so glad that I'm instead the person I am today.
It's hard when we're in the middle of a hectic life and we don't see much reward to avoid looking backwards and wondering "What If"? Perhaps what God wants us to do, though, is to stop looking back, to forget what lies behind, and to look forward to what He is going to do with the person we are now. We are becoming something very beautiful. Maybe it's different from what you thought you'd be, but it is beautiful. And the choices we make now will continue to shape ourselves. I'd just encourage you, in the years that come, to make the choices that give you deep relationships and a meaningful life. Don't look back. Just look forward. And in the end, we'll find real joy.
I was reading my Bible this week and a couple of things struck me all at once. Too often, I think, we rely on our eyes--our logic, what we see, what we think--to make decisions, rather than relying on God.
Exhibit A. Joshua, back in Joshua 9, makes a big mistake. The Gibeonites, who live in the land that is supposed to belong to Israel, are scared. They've seen other tribes nearby destroyed by Israel and their God. So they make it look like they live a long way away, and come to Joshua, and ask for a guarantee of peace. Joshua, it says in verse 15, "did not ask direction from the Lord." Instead, he relied on his eyes. These guys had a convincing story. It added up. There was no reason to doubt them.
Except that they were lying.
Exhibit B. Solomon, writing in Proverbs 5, is telling men to stay away from loose women. He says this, "for the lips of a loose woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil." Now, personally, I'm not tempted by loose women. But we can take the analogy to apply to us wives and moms, too!
And add the two together, and it's obvious that we can do the wrong thing because either: our decision looks logical; or our decision is very attractive.
In other words, we can't rely on our brains or our desires to always tell us what the right thing is. Sometimes our brains are rather smart, and I'm not saying we should disregard them altogether. And quite often what our heart wants to do is also the right thing. Just because we want something doesn't make it wrong.
But before we make any major decision, these passages tell me, we need to go to God, and not assume that we have within us all the capacity for making the right decisions. We don't.
I see this so often in marriages. It doesn't make any logical sense to stay with my husband. Or obviously, using logic, I am right and he is wrong. Or perhaps it's with parenting: I know this school would be the best one for my child because it's a Christian school. Or with working: it makes no sense to quit now because I'm about to get a raise, and we really need the money.
We're using our brain power, and not God, to make those decisions. We have to go to Him first.
I get that. I really do. But here's my problem: how do you hear God afterwards? Once you've asked Him, how do you know which way you should go?
Well, first, I think the episode in Joshua 9 is a rare one. Obviously we can't always depend upon our logic, but that doesn't mean that logic is usually wrong. So I think that if we are about to make a really bad decision, and we go to God, it's incumbent upon Him to let us know. And He will. If you pray, you'll get a sense of it. He'll use someone else to give you a word of wisdom. You'll sense a sign. After all, if He really doesn't want you to do something, it's in His best interests that you figure that out, right? So He isn't going to torture you about it.
That being said, though, we do need to spend more time in prayer, both to hear God, and for a simple renewal of our minds. Why does a loose woman seem so enticing (not to me, but to Solomon)? Because the person hasn't handed his heart over to God recently. And when we stop going to God, we squeeze Him out.
Look at that article I commented on earlier this week that denigrated stay at home moms. They didn't mean to; they were just using the logical position of our society: work is good, and day care is good, and parents aren't enough. But that position, while it may be widely believed, is not right. Similarly to another post this week about that meme in movies that says that every woman just needs to have sex to get over bumps in her life. We know it's not true, but it's all around us, and part of us, I think, buys into it.
And that's why we can't rely on logic. Our logic is tainted by the society we live in. We need to be renewed by God, and that means talking to Him, reading His word, taking time just to listen, and surrounding ourselves with friends who are also engaged in the same pursuit. Do that, and it's unlikely you'll make a really bad decision. Rely on yourself, and you probably will!
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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