Hindsight

There is this new ap (or newer, by ap standards I suppose!) called Timehop. It pulls together for you all of your old FB or other social media posts, pictures, etc from this same day a year ago, three years ago and five and six years ago. Mostly it's fun to look at and see old pics of the kids or remember things that happened. However, I've found that as much fun as it brings in those regards, it's also proven to be fairly disheartening to me in another.

I have noticed a remarkable trend in my posts from specifically five years ago. As I have read them I have found them to be very dark, and pessimistic and lacking any kid of hope or positivity. I remember struggling then, but I didn't remember it being like that. As I read them I wonder what people thought who read or saw them each day. What they thought of me. My life. My attitude towards it all.

Frankly, I don't like those posts and I don't like the person writing them. I don't like to see that was what my perspectives were like or how I viewed the world. The glass always seems rather half empty than full and there are only cloudy, dark glasses verses any kind of rose colored ones.

As I read these posts and wonder about this person who wrote them, while it would be easy to get really down on myself and feel ashamed or many negative things, the thing is as I read them- they make me sad. They make me sad that life was the way it was and more than that, that I couldn't find any light in it. I am so void of any kind of light in me and it just makes me, well..., sad.

In that sadness though, also comes gratitude. I went through a very transformative experience in terms of my faith and spiritual life almost three years ago now and it changed my perspectives and frankly so very much about me. As I read those posts that are so full of pain and void of hope, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the gift that God gave me of his love and grace and that it persevered and broke through those walls that were around my heart at that time. I can't help but feel a gratitude that even though there are still long days and rough days, that they aren't like what those days were like because in them now there is a light and a hope and a sense of future- even in the darkness. Because the light always shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot over come it.

Sometimes it takes something like this Timehop ap to show us how far we have come. To give us that hindsight we need to put our current situation or reality in to perspective.

Today I am grateful for this gift and for the grace that it gives.