Lessons from the ghosts that have been haunting me...

As part of my family's Christmas tradition we always go on a journey. Usually it includes a couple days in my wife's hometown in Virginia, and a couple of days in my hometown - Canton, NC. Then we do a vacation week with just the four of us. We continued our tradition this year. Returning to our hometowns is always a mixed bag. First we do love and enjoy seeing our families and getting to spend time with them. I was blessed to grow up in a wonderful family and our opportunities to be with them are too few and far between. Another enjoyable part of being back home is the holiday meal(s), and gift exchanges. I am just vain enough to admit that a third part I really like is the almost celebrity status I enjoy as the only member of my family to have moved out of town and now coming back home for a visit. There are always issues though: sleeping arrangements, hectic schedule trying not to miss seeing anyone, working our holiday events around the work schedules of my family, who are home in my hometown, and trying not get in their way... One issue though, that really hit hard this year was the ghosts... Now don't worry I have not lost my mind and started believing in "Casper" or the horror movie version of disembodied spirits bound in everlasting chains and sentenced to roam the earth and haunt the living. What I am talking about are the traces or residue of the relationships we have had, the decisions and choices we have made, and the sometimes painful regrets of knowing what was but is no more or possibly what could have been. In one of my early morning conversations with my Dad and Mom, while everyone else was still sleeping, we talked about many of my old high school friends. Unfortunately too much of the conversation focused on them telling me who had died this past year. I am way to young to have that many school friends dying. But a significant number have indeed died. Everyone of them from a self-inflicted cause - not suicide in its strictest sense, but lifestyle choices that robbed them of their lives. When I think back to the time I had with each of the people my Dad and Mom told me about, my heart breaks. Back in the day I was so inconsistent in my walk with Christ, to worried about whether or not I would be accepted and popular, so caught up in my own stuff that I didn't do a very good job of being a true reflection of Jesus to them and now they are gone, gone to meet Him... Regret is a tough pill to swallow! I cannot go back and change even one detail of my past, I cannot undo or redo, no one can. But the ghosts are haunting me, so what can I do?...........

I can learn from them to be more intentional in my living now. More careful to accurately reflect Jesus to those who are in my life now. I can't go back to then, and I am not promised tomorrow, but I do have now. So now I will love, live, share, give, converse, speak, reflect, preach, teach, work, be... with absolute passion for Jesus and the people he allows to be in my life.