Windshield and Rearview
By Shelly Berryhill
I have been thinking about glass.
Every time you get in a car, the design tells the truth. The windshield is large. The rearview mirror is small. That is not an accident. You are meant to look ahead. You are also meant to glance back. Live in only one of those views and you cannot see the whole picture.
Those of us with a Type A personality usually look only forward. We ignore the past. We like the old line: if you are not the lead dog, the view never changes. So we keep our eyes on the horizon. We plan. We prepare. We get ready for what is next. The trouble is not ambition. The trouble is amnesia. A man who will not look back will run the same ditch twice and call it a new road.
George Santayana put it plainly: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It is not enough to know where we are going. We have to understand where we have come from.
Here is the other danger, and it is just as real. Stare into the rearview and you will wreck what is in front of you. The mirror is small on purpose. You glance. You learn. You do not drive backward.
Scripture holds both sides of the glass. Moses told Israel to remember all the way the Lord led them. That Hebrew word, zakar, is not a dusty scrapbook. It means be mindful — let the past come to mind so it can shape what you do next. Paul, on the other side of the same road, said he was forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before. That is not a man erasing his history. That is a man who refused to be chained to it. Remember to learn. Do not stare and freeze.
My birthday was last week. Birthdays make you look both ways. At 62, I realize my past is much longer than my future. That puts things in perspective. A shorter runway means more has to get done in less time. COVID, the commission table, Sunday school, the books — none of that is decoration. It is how I got here. It is also how I know what still needs doing.
I sat at two funerals this week. I watched families gather and talk — cousins catching up, old stories coming back out. That is the rearview working. Too often, when the matriarch or the last patriarch dies, the family stops meeting. The table goes quiet. The stories stop. The link to the history breaks. We can do better. Families ought to keep gathering. The reunion should not die with the one who used to call it.
My past shapes who I am. It also shapes where I am headed. The same is true of a family. Keep the windshield wide. Keep the rearview honest. Glance back. Drive forward. Keep meeting. Keep both mirrors working.
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