I've been running from some things recently. People. Confrontation. This website. Quiet times. You. A plethora of places and circumstances that I've been fooled into thinking represent the crutches on which I've leaned for far too long. I've been determined to not make a placebo of anything less the Lord Himself, shutting myself in my bedroom for hours, refusing to leave until I've gotten a word from him (you know the story, perhaps you've read an earlier account of it in II Kings 19). He's been pretty silent, not even a whisper has been heard.

One of the places I've been running from is room 212. In it is an old Wurlizter piano with some sticky keys, a music stand and a mirror. The walls are blue-painted cinderblock and it has never seemed very conductive to creative expression; however, it has been the haven of some of my most intimate times of worship. In the middle of relationship disappointments, semester crunches and discipleship stumps, it has housed some spoken prayers, jumbled tongues and cupfuls of tears, becoming the place I've hidden when the world crashed around me.

I've been avoiding it even more than I've neglected this place you're reading now.

This week marks the end of a lot of years in school. I will walk out of my last undergraduate class, stand in line for my last textbook buy-back, pick up my last paycheck signed by the president of some academic institution in which I am a student, I will stand in line with a few hundred other graduates and we will be finished. We are what the world calls the future. And that's been another thing I've been avoiding.

Tonight found me at the old Wurlizter piano in room 212. Playing a song about giving the future, the dreams, you know, the stuff we're supposed to want to give to the Lord. But the last line, in the midst of all this angst about sacrificing the dreams we hold onto, is this—to You I give the past.

And I realize in this moment that it's not the future that I'm so frightened of, it's the past. Never in my life have I experienced so much as I've experienced up until this point and that is frighteningly overwhelming. Each moment I become more responsible for what happened the moment before—and I have made some of the most disappointing decisions and motions of my life in the past few months. The thing that is holding back most is not fear of the future, but fear of the past. Fear that the emotions, the things into which I've sown, the things I've chosen to believe, each of them disqualify me further and further until I am virtually useless.

Psalm 45 is tacked up on my computer screen at home: Listen, O daughter, give attention and incline your ear: Forget your people and your father's house; then the King will desire your beauty. Because He is your Lord bow down to Him...In place of your fathers will be your sons; You shall make them princes in all the earth.

This is about the future, but it's about the past too. About forgetting the things which have held us back and hindered us from moving forward in grace, knowing that along with the growing experiences we have hitched under our belts, we have a spiritual growth in grace—another place for His victory to pulse through us and display to others.

Lord teach us to run toward the future, and give continually back the past.