When You Cannot Forget

Sometimes things come back to haunt you,

playing and replaying in your mind--

such as your worst bad hair day

when your hair wasn't just bad but green..

 If you could just run away from the memories and leave them far behind.

 But sometimes you are left just trying to stay afloat

in a --well, anything but a boat,

and anything but oars to paddle with.

 How do you forget those painful memories that play and replay in your mind?

When you go to your knees, 

asking for an oar to help you paddle away from ditching at the shore,

will there be an answer from an all-knowing God?

And there upon your knees, on the first page that you open, you read, 

"Forget those things which are behind."

And you realize that forget is a verb.

Just like love is a verb, and love is a choice,

forget is a verb, and to forget is a choice.

You have to choose to turn your back on those haunting memories

and paddle away intentionally.

It's true that sometimes love just seems to happen, but very often, true, godly love is more of an intentional choice.

And while forgetting often happens, at other times it has to be an intentional choice.

God will always know every last bad or foolish or unnecessary thing you have done,

but when you turn to Him with your whole heart, He makes an intentional decision to forget it.

And while there will always be people who will be glad to help you remember 

the things you need to forget,

And while you can never make over those bad hair days that turned seaweed green,

or "fix" those situations that went completely out of control,

or those times that you sank beneath the waves

you can intentionally decide to leave these things behind.

Sometimes you really don't know how to define all the things that went wrong

in those seaweed green situations;

You just know that there was a lot of slime involved,

and you ended up with a lot of it dumped on you.

And sometimes the best thing you can do,
when you cannot define the green slime or what on earth or in the sea to do with it,

is to walk away and leave it all behind.

Because there is no nectar in green slime.