“Turn around and look at where you have come from. Look at where you have been,” the Lord says to me early this morning.

But I’m afraid to look back, afraid to see what is behind me. Afraid it will only point me to more of the same ahead.  I really hope that what lies ahead will be better than what has passed.  I do like and enjoy much of the past, but there’s enough unpleasantness and anguish there to make me not want to continue in it.  Still, I’ll do it. I’ll turn and look.

“I don’t see what I expected to see,” I say. When I turn I see a silver mist covering over what was my life up to this point. A shining, silver mist that made everything seem so much softer, so much easier. “It’s okay,” I say to the Lord. “I’m not afraid of it now.”

“Nor should you be,” he says.  “It is gone, behind you. You have feared that the darkness you felt in past times would – that it could – come up and overtake you. But it won’t. You have grown beyond that and what remains in your mind of the darkness is only in your mind. It is not alive. It cannot touch you now.

When you play it over and over in your mind it gains more and more darkness, more density, and more deceit for you.  If you stop the imaginations, and instead turn and look at what has been — straight on and without embellishment, it will be uplifting to you. It will be as a cloud that will guide you on into the brilliance of light of today. For you will know that today is not yesterday. Today you create anew.”

“Thank you for that, Lord.”  I close my eyes and let the words sink in, letting his presence fill me.  From this place, I know I can go into today and live in today. Live in the moment of today, live in the present.