Photo by Kaique Rocha from Pexels

“For you will not go out in haste, nor will you go as fugitives; for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.” (Isaiah 52:12, NASB)

It’s a day made for music. An overnight high front arrived on gusty wings, blowing away the unwelcome clammy nonsense that blanketed Christmas week. Maggie’s windchimes are applauding a lagging breeze as it lingers in our yard. How utterly Maggie of them – the chimes – to dance and sing in celebration for nothing more than a beautiful morning following days of dreariness. And with her favorite song, Mr. Blue Sky, stirring my soul from apathy, I feel ready to stare down a few days of reflection and goalsetting.

I don’t particularly like the obsession we all feel to look back over a spent year for no better reason than the rapid approach of a certain ball drop. And please don’t ask me to sit through one of those retrospectives set to sad music designed by newsrooms to force my memory to embrace events better forgotten. As Oswald Chambers puts it, “Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us.” I’d just as soon not finger the sharp edges and stubborn fixedness of the past, thank you very much. I’m not sure how much a brain is designed to hold and whether or not we have an option for storage upgrades. If it’s all the same to you, Mr. TV Producer, I’ll choose which memories I wish to keep. I’m not getting younger, and I have my priorities.

Which brings up another thought teasing the corners of consciousness. If memory storage space is finite, does it pose a risk to make new ones when the old ones are quite dear? This year I’ve traveled to exotic places, met new friends, and explored to the end of myself. I’ve pushed some limits with success and others have pushed back enough to make me regroup for another try another day. I’ve lived and laughed. A lot. I keep dancing with that limp, thank you Anne Lamott, and even added more music to the daily act of whatever it is I do daily. With surviving morphing into thriving, its more upwardly mobile cousin, do I risk spacing thoughts of Maggie from every few moments to every few hours? And do I remain faithful if I no longer feel compelled to photoshop her into each new snapshot?

Social scientist Rensis Likert was the first to formulate attitude assessments –the quizzes and surveys we love to take – into a linear arrangement or sliding scale of five components. In a given survey, the instructions might read: Color in the bubble next to the answer that best describes the frequency with which you watch the end of year retrospectives on TV.

0 Always
0 Often
0 Sometimes
0 Rarely
0 Never

Some assessments give seven options for the more nuanced among us, giving quiz takers the added option in the above example of Compulsively on one end of the spectrum to When Hell Freezes Over on my end. Is there a Likert scale for the stages of grief? And what does it say of me if the frequency of Maggie thoughts moved a notch this year from constantly to often? Will there ever be a time I bubble a different oval and what, exactly, causes these changes? A memory overwrite algorithm? Who designs that kind of thing?

Oswald Chambers wrote a devotional based on Isaiah 52:12 as an encouragement to leave the past to “rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ.” Copy that in a journal and stamp resolution over it. The passage in Isaiah is directed at the Israelites as they prepare to leave captivity for home. I turn my back on the babylon of my own fears and losses -those broken and irreversible things – when I prepare to walk forward, unfettered into a future of hope at His pace. Home. And I walk knowing God is already in that future marking out my steps while overseeing the rear to nudge me from the fringes of the past; a past both sweet enough to preserve its memories and tender enough to prevent tarrying.

Any day the depressing weight of grayness gives way to sunshine is a good day, a perfect day for music. Taking a cue from Maggie and her chimes, I’ll sing. For what is embracing the next verse of grief but the courage to continue the song in a different key?

For more on Maggie’s wind chimes, read here