The Wading Pool

On my drive home today, I heard a commercial for a “men’s health” product that promised to  “make you the man you used to be!”  It claimed it could return me back to my youth.

Yeah….uhhh…no thanks.

Beyond looking like a schmuck, when I look at that picture, when I think back to what lay inside that guy, I’m reminded of just how far the Lord has brought me.  If I could go back, the only reason I’d want to is to smack myself upside the head, get a hair-cut, and sit down and explain how all my stupid mistakes and sins would cost me.  It’d probably be in vain (because “that guy” knew it all back then), but it’d be worth a try.

Obviously, this commercial plays on our eternal search for the fountain of youth, right?  I know the sales pitch is designed to make my thirty-something self long for the “good ol’ days” of no aches and pains, no creaky joints, no perpetual tired-ness…I get that.   But I couldn’t help but laugh at it, because when I think back to “that guy”, the guy I used to be, the last thing I want is to go back!

Go back?  Not a chance.  I’m reminded of what Paul told the Corinthian church:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  1 Cor. 13:11

When I look back, when I think of who I was before Jesus set me free from slavery to sin, I truly was a child.  Like my kids, I thought I knew better than every adult, the epitome of my childish thoughts.  I was consumed with “me” and what I could get for me, even if it would destroy me.  Hey…I knew better, right?

Praise God, He didn’t leave me to wallow in that mire.  He opened my eyes to see the foolishness of that way of life, He allowed me to get to the end of “me”, and He began to raise me up, and clean me off.

And that process still goes on today.

No, I’m not that guy anymore, and I don’t want to be that guy any more.  I’m not who I’m going to be, one day…but I’m not who I was, either.  And the last thing I want to do is to go back.  Go back?  To what? That guy? Lost and desperately seeking to find his way?   No thanks.

I think of where the Lord has brought me from, I think of all that He has blessed me with (and the picture below tells a great deal of that story!).  Why in the world would I want to go back?  Why do you want to go back?

Plus, I’ve already been told by the beautiful lady in the picture below, if she’d have met “that guy”, she wouldn’t have given him the time of day!  That’s enough reason by itself!