Walking Backwards

I met a man walking backwards the other day. We are visiting Florida’s east coast, and I was doing my daily walk on the beach. I do half of it with my wife, and then I continue the second half alone at a faster pace. My physician says I should walk briskly at a pace fast enough that I cannot carry on a conversation. She says if I am not out of breath, it is not doing me any good.

So I was doing my daily walk with my wife the other day, and an elderly man passed us walking backwards. I call him elderly because he was probably ten years older than us. That is my definition of elderly now – anyone older than me. It was embarrassing to have an elderly man pass a youngster like me, and it was doubly embarrassing to have him going faster backwards than we were going forwards.

My self-esteem took a hit, and apparently my wife’s slumped as well. For it was at that point that she turned around and headed back to our rental condo. I kept going, not to be outdone by an octogenarian. (To be honest he may have been in his nineties, but that is too much for my ego to admit.)

Then the backwards-walking senior Ironman triathlon medal winner (I figured he had to be something like that) turned around and headed in my direction. I hailed him as he whizzed past. We stopped and chatted. I told him how impressed I was at his athleticism. He explained that he had read a scientific study, which claimed that walking backwards was good for balance, muscle strength, and cognitive function. It is called retro-walking. I told him I would give it a try, and I walked away from him ... backwards. That lasted about fifty feet.

That encounter on the beach got me thinking about our country. It does not take much to get me thinking about our country these days. It seems like half of the population is facing backwards. The motto “Make America Great Again” assumes that our nation was great sometime in the past. So they are headed backwards in that direction as fast as they can go. Full steam in reverse!

The problem is that the golden age that people imagine never existed. Every age had its serious problems. Do we really want to go back to a mortality rate before there were vaccines? Do people really want to return to the way society was before the Civil Rights movement? Before women had the right to vote? When sexual orientation was not spoken about openly? Apparently some do.

As a pastor I know that people in churches would like to return to a time when most people went to church. Church leaders would love for empty pews to be full again and Sunday Schools bulging again. They would love for traditional morality to be popular again. They would prefer to have offering plates heavy with cash again. Clergy would like to be respected in the community again.

Nothing is going to bring the past back. Sure, it would be great to have full churches and be able to support a family on one salary, complete with a home, automobile, and pension. But that was the product of the post war industrial economy. Nothing will replicate that economy today, especially not tariffs, as everyone will find out soon enough.

It is fine to look back to learn from our mistakes, but we cannot return to the past. Walking backwards may be good for your balance, but you can’t see where you are going. That can be a problem. We could fall into a hole made by kids digging in the sand, trip over an abandoned boogie board, or stumble into a beach umbrella. We might even collide with someone walking backwards in the opposite direction!

Walking backwards can be dangerous. I don’t care what that nonagenarian superman says! Our nation did not become great by going backwards. The Church is not going to grow into the future by yearning for the “glory days” of yesteryear. Our country is not going to solve its problems by trying to recreate an imagined past.

The past is past. No rewriting of history books, defunding museums, or banning books will change what happened. Furthermore, both past and future are just concepts in the mind. The only reality is now. The only way to live sanely is to accept reality as it presents itself (which is why it is called the present), and live today with integrity, courage, and compassion.

Life is hard. It can be made harder or easier through our attitudes and actions. Government and business can use power to cause harm or to bring healing. Jesus says that he judges nations by how they treat “the least of these” in society – the hungry, the poor, the foreigners, the prisoners, and the sick - which Jesus identifies as his brothers and sisters. If we love one another as Jesus instructed, then perhaps our great-grandchildren will look back and thank us for not going backwards.