F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story he titled, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” (His story formed the basis for a 2008 David Fincher film of the same name.) In the story, Benjamin Button is born, to the horror of his father, looking and talking like a 75-year-old man. As the story progresses, Benjamin ages backwards, becoming younger and younger until he becomes a baby and then disappears – or so it seems – from the scene.
Before the Benjamin Button film debuted, Star Trek: Voyager’s writers played around with the idea of moving backwards through time. In an episode from 1997, Kes awakes to find herself a wrinkled, dying woman, surrounded by a family she does not know. She has no memory of a past that led up to this moment. She is, in fact, a woman without a past, only a present; and in that present, she is dying.
As the story progresses, Kes repeatedly loses consciousness only to awake and find herself younger. Unlike the rest of the crew, she knows what the future holds. The crew, unlike her, knows what the past held. For them, the future is the great unknown; for Kes, it’s the past. She guides her actions by what she knows of the future; they guide theirs by what they know of the past.
The story idea could illustrate an important biblical truth: The good life God has in mind for us to live is predicated on a knowledge of the past and the future. Christians have inside information on both.
To the degree we misunderstand our past, which we all do to some degree, we cannot be wise. And without some firm knowledge of our future, we cannot be secure. Understanding our past gives us wisdom. Understanding our future gives us confidence.
All of us have known people who are chained to the past by their sorrows. They cannot get beyond their suffering. We’ve known other people who are bound to the past by their successes. They get stuck in some ancient triumph and fail to grow to become the person God wants – and others need – them to be. The first group is filled with regret. The second is void of hope. Neither gets much out of the present.
For Christians it is different—or it should be. Their past, whether pleasant or tragic, was transformed when they were united to Jesus Christ by faith. In that miraculous moment, their story was fused to his story and what happened to him became more important to their lives than anything that ever happened to them. Their past and his past were indivisibly joined.
Not only that, their future and his future were linked. If you are a Christian – I’m not talking about someone who has a vague belief in God and a positive opinion of Jesus, but about a person who has committed their life to God in the belief that Jesus is the savior of the world and the Lord of all – the most important thing in your life happened in someone else’s life. It happened to Christ. His story is your story. His past is your past, and his future is your future. Knowing that will change your present.
When I was 16, I was a newish believer. I had been instructed to read the Bible, which I was doing, but I didn’t know much about it. On most Sundays, our old (he was younger than I am now) pastor’s sermons worked on me like a tranquilizer. I was just muddling along the best I could. But I believed in Jesus and I understood that my future was all wrapped up in him.
I was willing to endure – or rather, I willed to endure – in order to experience the future God had for me. Many were the times I said to God, “Whatever it takes” (and because my faith was so small I would imagine the worst things a teenage boy could), “I want to be all that you can make me.” Do you see what was happening? The future was altering my present. I was not just living out of my past with its hurts and losses; I was living into my future. You could say I was living backwards. Living backwards is a skill every disciple of Jesus needs to learn. The better we become at it, the better we will be at making the most of the present.
The Way Home 
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