My home city of Melbourne is now in the unenviable position of experiencing its fifth lockdown, and many of us are finding ourselves making comparisons with “previous lockdowns” we have known. This particular lockdown has the misfortune of falling at the same time as the beginning of our long, long winter lockdown last year. And so the comparisons are easy to make, different though the circumstances are this time around. I find myself looking at photographs that show how small my children were this time last year. As I trudge through the mud of our backyard I remember the twins learning to crawl through that mud and dragging it everywhere they went. And I remember their hesitant then eager first steps and the ways I had to keep pulling them out of the not-yet-established vegetable patch that my wife was working on.
Not all memories are fond. Trauma has its own ways of influencing memories. I find personally that I revisit the experiences of trying to carry VCE students through their final year of school with all the uncertainty of the world we found ourselves in and an internet connection that enjoyed dying at key educational moments. I dread repeating the feelings of inadequacy I faced as a teacher in 2020. I am easily drawn into the fear of repeating it all.
But memories, psychologists will tell us, are not video recordings of the past. They can be skewed, rearranged, biased. Today I attempted to capture two moments of beauty that I saw through the window of my home office: droplets of water on a bare peach tree’s branches, and a shaft of afternoon sunlight through the window so dazzling that it overexposed the whole image. As with photographs, so with memories: the image we end up with is not necessarily all that we saw and experienced at the time.
There are many beautiful moments in the Bible – in the Old Testament in particular – when God is spoken of as reversing the story that His people have experienced. In Joel 2:25 God says, “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” The Psalms are full of God turning mourning into dancing. Psalm 126 has this particularly wonderful description:
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
2 Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.”
3 The Lord has done great things for us;
we are glad.
Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
like streams in the Negeb!
5 Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!
6 He who goes out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.
Though in the second half of the psalm we see that the restoration is not quite finished – they are still praying that God will restore their fortunes like a dry river bed replenishing itself with streams – we have this wonderful image of seeds being sown in tears and becoming a joyful harvest.
I cannot really see the joyful harvest that is being sown now. But I know that God’s view of my story and my circumstances are not the same as mine. I need to turn my eyes to how He views this day I am in, not the blurred or washed out version that I too often see instead.
The Consolations of Writing 