“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

I always thought that was a stupid saying. I also thought it would be a nice crack to make at the end of the semester if you were a history teacher and you were trying to freak out, and entertain, students who were failing. Anyway, as I grew up, I found that even though I rolled my eyes at it for years, it’s probably pretty true. The whole idea of learning from mistakes strikes a chord with me. (Yes, yes, we’ve all been through this before!)

But deeper than that, does not learning from history also doom someone to mediocrity? I think it might.

I myself have lately begun a love affair with History. And there’s just something about it that never fails to get me hot and heavy (which, if you want to know, I am anyway.). The thing is this: History is now.

For most of my life, history was just this thing happening in fourth period while I counted down the minutes till lunchtime and/or recess. It was like this nice boy that hangs out with all your girlfriends and you think he’s pretty alright and might have a crush on you but he’s just not substantive enough for your taste. My teachers strived to get the photocopied pictures in our books to really hit home, wiping their sweat stained brows in front of a room of dull eyed children who refused to care. And all I could think was, “So, let me get this straight: this thing happened, and then this thing happened? Wow, that’s really . . . not fascinating at all.”

But then you go off to college, and you come home over break and you’re hanging out with your high school chums and you run into History coming out of the library. He’s grown his hair out and is reading Russeau and Satre. He’s traded his specs in for a motorcycle, and suddenly you realize that history is actually kind of hot. He’s out of the classroom and into the streets.

This may all be a little too obscure. What I really mean to say is that in recent times, I’ve begun to appreciate history for its introspection. That is, learning about the development of the world reminds me that things haven’t always been the way that they are, and so, carried out, things won’t always be as they are now either. And that lends a great deal of efficacy and agency.

Great historical junctures of the nation, like the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement . . . Its great to think to myself that they were not guarantees. Imagining an upstart group of farmers forming a makeshift militia and taking on one of the most powerful military powers on the globe at the time is completely insane, and even more so, the idea that such a thing would be successful? Seems improbable to the extent of laughable. But these outgunned people had an idea and a conviction, and upheld it without knowing the outcome. SUPER hot.

And it’s inspirational, right? Knowing the uncertainties faced, the fear that all could have been lost and come to nothing, the fact that brave souls made brave choices anyway is wonderful. So when people say to me when I come up with some hair-brained social change, “That’s just the way it is,” I get to be all, “Oh really? You know who never said that? Martin Luther King Jr.!!!”

Everything moves and progresses. Everyone has the opportunity to make something of time. And one day people will look back on this time like so much barbarianism, horsedrawn carriages, and livestock in the streets. Everything changes. And we will change it.

I have A Problem.

Okay, okay, so I have many problems. In fact, my biggest problem sometimes is trying to catalog and address all my problems. Especially the cataloging part. I have problems like a bargain hunter after a liquidation sale. My problems are varied and voluminous, oddly sized and awkwardly shaped. But they are all exacerbated by The Problem I drew attention to previously, which is this: I love the short road.

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I ask myself, When did you begin to grow? Was it when everything fell apart or did it start before?

There seems to me to be a piece of everything that’s happened in everything that came before. Nothing simply appeared. If I hadn’t gone to a sleepover in seventh grade at the house of a girl I didn’t know very well. If I hadn’t been at a certain Bible study my first week of college. If that other boy hadn’t been bitter, if she hadn’t thrown me that surprise 20th birthday party. It was all so tenuous. It could have all turned out differently. But it didn’t. And this evidence reminds me that God’s plan is sometimes interwoven so by little things that it may seem at times as though nothing at all is happening. But then something will happen, like a couple offering to raise your child and give her the home that you would have wanted for her, and looking back, all the steps will come together.

And this is what I need to keep sight of.

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I know what I am.

But I’m still learning what I’m going to be. God knows. And in attempting to allow him to bring me into further alignment with him, and trying to pursue him as relentlessly as he has pursued me, it’s a joyful adventure, and so full of surprises. Not that I could pursue him as beautifully and doggedly as he has me. I cannot believe the places he has come to to find me and take me back with him.

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There are dark times. This is one of them.

This year I have lost both my daughter and my mother, four months apart to the day. The woman I came from and the someday-woman I bore are both gone from me, and that makes me wonder . . . where do I go now? What do I do with my life? How can I now make them proud? What would they expect from me? What do I expect from myself? And most importantly, what does God expect?

I could say this was the most devastating time of my life. But it isn’t. Of course, it’s painful. It . . . twists in me. But it has also been a time that I have seen most clearly the faithfulness and providence of God. As I was going through my mother’s papers, I found a letter I sent a few years ago to encourage her and in it I wrote how God knew what was happening and He had control of it. Reading it over now, I thought to myself, How could I have possibly known that then?

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