Walking with Confidence to the Future

What are your plans and goals for this year? Do you have any?
One of the key components of my 12 month appointment with Hobart Baptist Church is the development of a vision and plan to position the church for its next steps. During the later months of last year we completed the first phase of this process and now a small planning taskforce has begun to develop the key points of a plan based on feedback from phase one.
Planning the future like this is a challenge for Christians because it opens up the heart of a tension. We are called to go into the world to “be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth and rule over it” (Genesis 1:28), yet God says he has plans to prosper us and give us future (Jeremiah 29:11). As Walter Brueggemann explains, God both “gives us permission to choose our futures,” yet also “chooses a future for us that is gracious beyond our choosing”. So we are called to plan for the future, but know that God always has a plan in store for us.
Did you know that ancient Middle Eastern cultures, and some people groups today, conceive of time very differently to us westerners? For them the past is something they face, it is before them. The future lies behind them and at their back. They picture themselves as walking backwards into the future.
Our modern society works the opposite way around. For us the past is at our backs, it lies behind us and we walk forward into the future.
I’m not sure that either way is the right way, just different. Walking backward into the future has certain logic about it. The reality is that we often don’t know where we are going and the future is a big unknown. Walking backward acknowledges that the past is all we know and we can learn from it as we approach the future.
But walking backwards has problems. We can’t anticipate obstacles or the unexpected. We can easily stumble and hurt ourselves. It can give us a false sense of security as we imagine that future will be a repeat of the past.
Walking backwards can also cause us to focus on the negatives – what we’ve done wrong, how we’ve failed, where we’re hurt – and these disappointments induce fear that leaves us unable to move on. So despite what we can learn from the past it can also be an unreliable guide to the future.
Our biblical worldview enables us to walk forward into the future with confidence, because, as the old Sunday school song goes, “I know who holds the future and I know he holds my hand.” God is the author of the future, and because he knows it I need not fear it, I can go about planning for it knowing God will be there in it with me.
So as we move into 2011 and begin our planning we can do so with confidence. The confidence is born not from the fact that we can clearly see where we are going, or that we can trust our planning, but that we know the creator God stands behind us looking forward, guiding us into the unknown. So let’s pray and play with confidence for the future God has in store for us.
Here is a link to an article entitled The Conception of Time in the Ancient Near East
Stephen L Baxter