Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather
— Robert Frost, “Directive”
When I hear these four opening lines of one of Robert Frost’s most iconic poems, I think that Frost mentions a past, a past too far gone to be retained. We go from point A to point B, yet there’s no way to ever get back to point A. The opening lines in “Directive” force us to zoom out of a time like now, because it is “too much for us”.
Like a guide, the narrator forces us to journey to a past marked by the weathered graveyard marble sculpture. The guide forces us to a time when things may have been good and Eden-esque, a time that is not now.
The poem’s opening lines have gotten me thinking about this past year and how we tend to look at the past and reconstruct narratives in hindsight. Hindsight bias always has us thinking that the past was some kind of idyllic time of no struggle and paradise, when in fact we had challenges, even though they were different from what we have now.
I remember where I was around this time last year, lost, unsure of where to go next, unsure if I was making a single positive impact on the world. Every day, I was inundated with a reminder, from myself and others, that I was a waste of space, that it would be much better for the world I was in if I wasn’t there.
Say what you want about Christianity, but the reality is that God and the ministries that surrounded me saved me when the world left me forsaken. I won’t get into specifics, but people prayed for me. People talked to me at my rock bottom moments. People refused to give up on me.
Everything crashed down, and it was around this time last year that Romans 5:8 rings true: “God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” I was a sinner, and nothing more than my circumstances proved that so, yet my friends and family continued to show grace to me every single day, even on the days I didn’t deserve it.
It is this time of year that brings me to that place of pain, devastation, and yet simultaneous hope from last year. The holidays can be a time of joy and a time to feel merry, but for a lot of us, too, they’re a time of sorrow, when we’re supposed to be happy, but can only be reminded of pain. “The pressure to feel the joy of Christmas can make joy all the more difficult,” says David Mathis of Desiring God.
Mathis goes on to tell us that the first Christmas, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, was not merry in the slightest. The first Christmas, a man named Joseph resolved to divorce a woman named Mary. Mary was pregnant, and a virgin, before the two of them were to be married. But God told Joseph to “not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
The birth of Jesus came with a lot of pain: Herod resolved to kill and slaughter all the male children of Bethlehem. But when Herod did, Joseph and Mary had already fled to Egypt.
“The life that came into the world that first Christmas was not to be an easy one,” Mathis writes. “Not at birth, not in infancy, not in adulthood.”
In Christ, however, we rejoice, and for me, that means looking at where I was last year, and knowing that that period of time, that stage of my life was all part of God’s plan. God got me through a time of deep isolation and depression, and used that time to make me who I am now: a devoted inner-city teacher.
It wasn’t the route I may have wanted at the time. But I couldn’t have gotten where I am any other way, and this time of year, take some downtime to similarly reflect retrospectively on your journey from this point in time last year. It might not have been an ideal journey. It might have had a lot of bumps in the road, a lot of hurdles, a lot of going back and forth.
But this is your journey. No one else could have the same story. With that knowledge of God’s plan, take ownership of it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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