What Does the Past Tell Us About the Present?

Life Lessons

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

What was your favorite subject in school?

I loved history.

There is something about the past that speaks to us in the present. I studied American History, Mississippi History, World History, and Ancient History. I even took a course in Church History.

History tells us something about how we arrived where we are. It helps us understand the present, and sometimes it even gives us a glimpse of what may lie ahead.

As a child, I read the Dick Tracy comic strip. Dick Tracy had a wristwatch that he used to communicate with others. At the time, that seemed like something from the imagination. Today, we can make calls, send messages, receive information, and do countless other things from a watch on our wrist.

The imagined future became the present.

Genealogy has also taught me the importance of understanding the past. It allowed me to discover how my ancestors came to America and why. I learned that my great-grandfather fought with the 23rd Alabama Infantry at Vicksburg during the Civil War. Years later, standing at Vicksburg and finding the position where his unit served during the siege gave me a connection to the past that was difficult to describe.

Suddenly, history wasn’t simply names, dates, and battles in a book.

It was family.

Church history helped me in another way. It helped me understand why Christianity has developed so many denominations, traditions, and movements. I discovered, for instance, that the Free Will Baptist movement began in 1727 in the same part of the country where my maternal and paternal ancestors lived after coming to America around that period.

History helped me understand my own story.

Looking at events in my family’s past also helped me better understand my mother and father. Learning about the Great Depression helped me appreciate how difficult life must have been when they married in 1933. Their experiences shaped the people they became, just as the experiences of our own generation shape us.

During my lifetime, I have watched enormous changes take place. I have seen the rise of calculators, computers, television, and cell phones. My parents were born into a world in which automobiles had not yet become a necessity of everyday life.

Life is constantly changing.

New inventions appear. New diseases emerge. Nations rise and fall. Wars begin and end. Cultures change. Ideas that once seemed impossible become ordinary parts of everyday life.

Yet some things remain remarkably constant.

We are still human.

We are finite beings. We are imperfect. We love, hope, fear, struggle, succeed, fail, learn, and sometimes refuse to learn. Each generation seems destined to repeat at least some of the mistakes of generations before it because we so easily ignore the lessons of the past.

But in a volatile and sometimes chaotic world, there is another constant.

God.

The God we seek today is the God who created the sun, moon, and stars.

God is the same God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush.

God is the same God whose voice was heard at the baptism of Jesus: “This is my Son, the Beloved.”

History may never have been your favorite subject. You may not care about ancient civilizations, military movements, genealogical records, or dates written in a history book.

But there is a lesson from the past that all of us need to hear:

We are beloved children of God.

God is love.

God breathed into humanity the breath of life, and God’s Spirit continues to draw us toward love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Perhaps one of history’s greatest lessons is that our lives are built on relationships—our relationship with God, with one another, with ourselves, and with the creation of which we are a part.

When those relationships become distorted, people suffer.

When those relationships are restored, healing becomes possible.

That lesson is as old as humanity, and we are still learning it.

So perhaps the past does more than tell us where we have been.

Perhaps it invites us to consider who we are becoming.

May God continue to open our eyes that we may see, unplug our ears that we may hear, and loosen our tongues that we may speak of the mighty God we serve.

And may we become wise enough to listen when the past speaks.

The Curious Pilgrim
Reflections on faith, family, and mysterious grace.