Don’t long for the
‘good old days.’ This is not wise. (Ecclesiastes 7:10)
People often talk about the good old days – how things were so much
better in the past. The summers were warmer, people were kinder, life was
better. It’s good to look back at the past, but
nostalgia does more than reminisce about the past; it looks back to the past as
if it were some kind of golden age. Nostalgia tends to make you live in the
past, rather than the present. Charles
Kettering said: ‘You can’t have a better tomorrow if
you’re thinking about yesterday all the time.’ It seems that too many people get nostalgic about a lot of things
that in fact weren’t so great the first time around. Nostalgia is nothing to do with age; you can be nostalgic at
twenty-one, if you find yourself looking back to something you experienced when
you were fifteen as the highlight of your life. People talk about ‘in my day’ or
they speak of the past as the best days of their life. However, for Christians,
every season of life should be the best days and the years to come will be even
better. For a Christian every day is ‘your day’.
Nostalgia is a form of unbelief, and unbelief is devoid of hope.
Nostalgia makes it hard to believe that God will do something now; it makes God
only a God of the past. Nostalgia locks you into an idealized past that never
existed. The Israelites who left Egypt with Moses became nostalgic about an
imaginary past. They looked back to their life in Egypt through the lens of
their current experience and concluded they had left behind a life that was
really good and far better than what they were experiencing in the present:
The rabble with
them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and
said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no
cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost
our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” (Numbers 11:4-6)
Their unbelief and nostalgia worked together to make them believe a lie:
they hadn’t had a good life at all. They had been slaves who had suffered
terribly at the hands of the cruel Egyptians. They had cried out to God to
deliver them from their torment! Here they were, reminiscing about a
non-existent past in complete and utter unreality. Nostalgia is the curse of
faith; it distorts reality and misinterprets the facts of history.
How do you know if you’re nostalgic? Answer these questions: Do you
look to the past with more affection and pleasure than you do to the future? Do
you talk more about the past than the present and the future? Do you wish you
could live in your past?
