LEARN, LIVE, HOPE

   Before Arlena and I went on our trip to Italy last year, I bought a journal to record our journey and jot down learnings and random thoughts that might arise as we moved from place to place. I did not realize at that time how valuable that journal would be as we were so inundated with sights and sounds and information that my mind could not seem to grasp it all. I had to record some of those learnings just to remember them.

   As I leafed through that journal recently, I noticed the words embossed on the cover: “LEARN from yesterday, LIVE for today, HOPE for tomorrow”. In so many ways is that not what life is all about, especially what those pages inside that journal are for? That journal is filled with some of my yesterdays, remembrances of them. Every time I read through it or even read a small section in it, I remember something of what I learned on that trip back to my roots.

   If what I learned yesterday, learned in all those yesterdays past, is to have any value, the value will be in how I incorporate that learning in my life today, if it has become a part of me whether I realize it or not. For we live today. We live for today. We cannot live in the past and we cannot live tomorrow. If we have not learned from our yesterdays, we will have wasted them. And if we do not learn anything as we live today, tomorrow, when today becomes yesterday, will be less hopeful.

   For our yesterdays teach us how to live better todays so that our tomorrows will be filled with hope, with the hope that tomorrow will be better than both yesterday and today because of what we have learned as we live each day to the fullest. For all of this to happen, we have to be very intentional about each moment in time, for each moment is a learning experience given to us by God. Whether we learn from it or what we learn from it is up to us.

   Of course much of what we learned in our yesterdays past was the result of living fully in our todays. It was like osmosis. Our learning somehow became a part of us and not because we deliberately wrote it down in a journal to remember or to reflect back upon at some later date. We learned today on our way to tomorrow.

   Perhaps all of this sounds more philosophical or prosaic than real. Perhaps. And perhaps it all is. Perhaps we often get so involved in living life today that we have little or no time and also no desire to remember what we learned yesterday or to worry too much, if at all, about tomorrow. In fact, we do. Today is so filled with activity that yesterday is barely remembered and tomorrow is given little heed.

   Nevertheless, to live for today means that we regularly take stock of what we learned yesterday so that tomorrow will be hopefully anticipated. To do that means that we have to, on occasion, pick up those journals of our yesterdays and peruse them. Those journals can be pen on paper or simply catalogued somewhere in our brains. But they are there. They can help us not only understand today better but also to live it more fully and they can make our tomorrows full of hope.                                                                       WJP