As a follower of thriller style movies, I’m looking forward to the “Bourne Ultimatum” that’s due on screen next week. It’s the final film of three that follows books by Robert Ludlum. In the series Jason Bourne is on a mission to discover his true identity, a mission he completes at the end of the second book. In the third he must face the ghosts of his past to stop his own history screwing up his present and future life.
Like Bourne of the film, most of us carry baggage from the past. Some of it is quite obvious, like a bloke in fish net stockings and a short skirt. But for the rest of us it is subtle in the sense that it affects how we live but only we know why.
It’s easy to say that the past is the past and we need to move on, and in part that’s true. The big question is, “how much baggage we are dragging with us on the journey? If we are to leave the past behind, we have to leave it all there, not just some of it. Things like anger, lack of trust, honesty, fear, openness and so on. We may well leave the past in the past, but its residue has a habit of revisiting when we least expect or want it.
Each week I put a wheelie bin out on the road. It’s a good day because it means all the rubbish of the week gets removed from our property. Every now and then we forget to put it out and then have to contend with overflowing rubbish and the occasional foul odour. On those weeks I find myself climbing on top of the rubbish to compress it down further so we can get more in.
Yet oddly enough we do this with the stuff of our past. We shove it down deep into some restricted part of our lives hoping it will go away. The problem is, when we do this long enough it takes more and more effort to stop it overflowing in public. When it does, it wrecks the present for us and those around us.
There’s a theme in the New Testament called “confession”. It’s not popular these days because we’ve convinced ourselves there’s no such thing as sin or it’s what other people do. But then, why do we have dark spaces in our lives that we keep tucked away. It may be full of what we have done or someone has done to us, but it’s dark just the same.
Confession is a way of emptying the rubbish so we can live more freely. It’s not about condemnation, it’s about healing. And it’s better than you can possibly imagine. We all need confessors; people we respect and in whom we can confide. If you haven’t got one, find one. Like Bourne, it might be a frightening journey, but in the end you’ll discover a better future.
© Digby Wilkinson 2007