Forever and Always

Quantum mechanics allows a little fuzziness in time, but on any sort of human time scale, the past is done. We each know our life as a little point riding and guiding the arc of our years. Our moving finger writes, and having writ . . . the curve of life we wrote on the world and on each other is indelible, timeless, fixed in eternity. We don't perceive it that way, but the past is now always, and perhaps our knowledge will change and we will see it so too.

Forever and always—that glorious picnic and the baby's smile. And also forever furtively reading your sister's diary. And forever the horror in the village when the raiders came. If God erased the evil He would have to remake the world entirely—our lives, our choices, everything—we'd no longer have been.

Some of you may think it worth it—the ones who endure the burden of broken self hood in a ruined world. “Let it all have never been and I can find oblivion!” God had a subtler idea, and He offers the chance to redeem us.

Does He then redeem the past too? Or do only a new nature of grace and the works of it survive, with all the evil ripped away into the abyss? Can good works exist without context? If not then perhaps the past will be redeemed—occasions for grace covered by the sacrifice of Jesus. Perhaps we will be able to look at our anguished history and praise God for the great good revealed.