Don’t Look Back

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

2 Corinthians 5:17

A RELATIONSHIP FROM MY TEEN YEARS STILL MAKES ME WINCE WHENEVER THE girl’s name comes to mind and I think about the hurt I caused her. One day I was wondering and praying about looking her up to tell her how sorry I felt for how I acted decades ago.

One of my best friends—a marriage and family therapist from San Diego—adamantly opposed the idea. “Gary,” Steve said, “I’m thinking this is more about you than it is about her.” In his counseling experience, Steve discovered that looking up someone many years later can be dangerous; you don’t know where he or she is coming from or what’s happening in his or her life. The potential for hurt is just as great as the potential for healing.

But the clincher came when he said, “Look, why don’t you take all the energy you’re using thinking about this and spend it on planning how you can love your wife today?”

That’s when it dawned on me: guilt attacks us by using a dead relationship to distract us from a living one.

I remember the time a woman approached me after I had taught on the topic of sacred history—the meaning two people build together when they persevere through the difficult seasons in life. After hearing me talk, she felt convinced she had sought an unbiblical divorce with her first husband—but it was too late to go back. She had remarried and her ex-husband had remarried, and now she was poisoning her current marriage with the dead relationship from the past.

“The real danger here,” I said, “is that through this guilt about the past, you’ll fail to love your second husband, just like you failed your first husband. It seems to me your charge is to focus on loving your current husband like he’s never been or ever will be loved. You need to stop thinking about your first husband and focus on the husband you’re called to love now.”

I saw a light go on in her countenance when I said this—and I could see visible relief on her second husband’s face. Clearly, he had been feeling cheated.

Some things in our past can’t be “fixed.” You can repent, you can ask for forgiveness, but you can’t always go back—nor should you try. Some of us are more introspective and hold on to our guilt in such a way that we become blinded to our present obligations.

When guilt comes knocking on your door about a failed relationship from the past, start praying about how to love your spouse today. Don’t let a dead relationship pollute or weigh down a living one.

Don’t let a dead relationship pollute or weigh down a living one.

For others, the dead relationship isn’t about guilt but about fantasy. These folks allow a relationship that never worked out to steal the energy they should be pouring into their marriages. If only I had married him instead! they think, or, I wonder what so-and-so is doing right now? So instead of praying about how to love his or her spouse, he or she daydreams about being married to this other person.

There are few things so destructive and self-defeating as giving way to such fantasies—fantasies that can’t be fulfilled in a biblically appropriate way. Since there’s little chance this relationship can happen (I’ve even heard people confess they’ve tried to justify these thoughts by wondering what might happen if their current spouse died), it is simply wasted time—time stolen from what you could be using to make your current marriage more meaningful.

Besides, there’s a reason behind why this dead relationship isn’t a living one! Our memories tend to be very selective. We forget the negative and fixate on the positive—and every such fantasy robs our spouses of energy and thought that should be expended on them.