A Lot

“Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.”
-Anna Akhmatova

There are certain things that happen in life that have the potential to humble a person; death, divorce, defeat, sometimes inevitable parts of living on God’s Grey Earth. As a child, you automatically classify yourself as a member of the privileged class, an elite and privileged sub-section of the genus Untouchable. You’re sheltered. But, the older you get, the more life seems determined to remind you that all the world is a stage and we herein are merely its unpaid amateur actors. It seems that the older one gets the less likely the world is willing to indulge the individual. Life’s lessons do not bring you up…they drag you up. Forcefully and with no warning usually. As the years pile on themselves in a vicious effort to draw you ever closer to your twilight years, you find that your childlike qualities are very quickly replaced,a paradigmatic shift in perceptions occurs. Your understanding changes and you find your sheltering idealism suddenly snatched away from you like a wig in a storm.

I plan my life; I map out my memories, determine my destination and propose my purpose for the year/5 years/10 years ahead. I make plans based on my hopes, goals AND ability. But as Robert Burns warns us “…The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry”. King Solomon concurs and reminds us that “Man proposes and God disposes”(Prov 16:9 Paraphrased). For me, after a life of very few hard-knocks, an idyllic life that might be surreal to many, I found that the very first slap Life gave me almost took me out of the match; I almost passed the baton to the next runner and abandoned the field of play. Life first gave me a death and to say it left me reeling is an understatement. There was after all the well established rule that bad things did not happen to me or mine. “I thought you knew this?” I asked God. “This is a well-recognised law for God’s sake!”, I informed God. The universe understood it, the stars didn’t but respected it anyway and nature, naturally co-operated. But death visited and snatched a life from me, exalting in its victory. A short-lived victory because here I am, still standing having lived through my worst nightmare! I stumbled, but as Tolsoy says, “If I know the way home and I am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side?”. I found my way back home and into to God’s waiting arms.

But despite the progress you make, sometimes the past will impose on your soul like you owe it money. For such times, times when I fear, when i doubt myself, when my past threatens to limit my future, I found inspiration in a Bible story. The story of Lot’s wife in the book of Genesis, 19:26 is my revelation. The story of Lot’s wife turning into salt was one I never really paid attention to before. BUT this is an amazing analogy of human beings and life today. (The Bible has done it again y’all!).

Lot’s wife had been told to leave her city with her family because it would be destroyed by God. “Don’t look back!!!” Lot warned and warned, in accordance with God’s directions. But as Lady Lot ran out of her city, she cast one last look back at her city. In sadness, seeing her city full of her friends perish? In wonder, at what God rescued and saved her from? In happiness, at her haters’ eventual downfall and total destruction? In fear and worry, as she witnessed all that she had worked so hard for go up in hellish flames? Whatever the case, Madame no look road she stay dey look back. Lady Lot wouldn’t focus on the road in front of her, instead she looked back and received her punishment. Not just for disobeying God but for two other reasons, I suspect.

For one thing, Lady Lot did not trust God and His promises enough to let go of her past. Secondly, by turning around to take inventory of what was behind her, she inevitably slowed herself down. She hampered her progress by those few minutes or even seconds that she stood staring at all that she HAD rather than looking forward at all that she would HAVE if she trusted her Maker.

Mrs. Lot turned into a pillar of salt. An immovable block of salt is actually the paragon of stagnation. I think that the moral of the story, is that her past had held her so captive that she could not move forward to face the future. A free, unlimited, unmarked, potential-filled future, by the way. Maybe she should have been considering the future with anticipation of another chance? Perhaps she should have looked to the future with thanksgiving to God for remembering The little Lots in their tiny Sodom home? Or maybe when Mrs. Lot was looking back at her past, she should have been standing in awe of God’s mighty power in saving her AND her family from that very past?

I realise that in many ways I have been Mrs. Lot, standing mobile crying over the lot I have lost. A shame really, when my best is yet to come. As Proverbs 4:18 tells me, “The path of the just is like a shining light that shines brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter….”