The present is where time touches eternity

At a friends behest I watched eternal sunshine of a spotless mind the other day. Being neither a fan of “artsy” movies nor a fan of Jim Carey I didn’t expect much. One particular scene in the movie stuck with me though…..it’s the scene where Jim Carey, trying to hide his girlfriend from being “erased” takes her back to a memory he has of his childhood before she was even in his life, and of course that memory is then erased. I began to think if it was even possible to “wipe” someone from your life that meant something to you without having to wipe the whole mind.

Anyone who’s been in serious relationship will understand what I mean, that the relationship although in the present somehow reaches back in time to affect the past, so that your memories of things like childhood are tied into the present, tied in with the experience of sharing that memory. That relationship takes the edge of bad memories and multiplies the joy of good ones…..even when the memory took place before the relationship. That a relationship can in some senses exist outside time, that it goes back in time and affects your perception of the past, it moulds your vision of the future.

I was then re-reading C.S Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” (highly recommended to anyone who hasn’t read it). When I ran across this passage:
You cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he bought no message back. But you can get some likeness of it if you say that both good and evil when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved, Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the blessed will say “we have never lived anywhere except in heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.

I love the fact that heaven will turn “what seemed, when I entered it to be the vale of misery” when I look back “to have been a well; and where present experience sees only salt deserts, memory truthfully recalls that the pools were full of water” That one day I’ll see clearly “face to face” that I will see all my present experiences in the light of His grace. That His relationship with me will reach back in time to me past, to my present to the experiences I will have in the future so that when I see Him and see my life through his eyes I will see his hand through it all. That like in “footprints” I will not look back and see my struggle but rather Him carrying me through it, not my wounds but His tender healing, not my plans gone awry but His plans coming to fruition. May I come to see the day where I see my beloved face to face and He wipes away every tear from my eyes, not just in the present, but by enlighting me to his presence in my past.