I came across this clue in a crossword puzzle recently: “It’s a ___ sort of memory that only works backwards.” The missing word, of course, is “poor,” and it was spoken by the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. 
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Carroll really was brilliant, wasn’t he? Because that’s a great observation: in this natural world of ours, our memories only work backwards.

But how about in the supernatural world, the realm of the One who invented the universe and everything in it, including human beings with memories that often take us places we'd rather be -- or would rather not ever experience again?

Is it possible that in looking backwards, we’re glimpsing our futures?

I’ve long suspected that this might be the case, that, for the born-again believer in Jesus Christ, those joyful memories that fill us with such longing for the past may actually be glimpses of the joy awaiting us for all eternity. And maybe, just maybe, those who reject Christ until it’s too late experience the opposite phenomenon – recalling painful earthly memories that are warnings of the eternal anguish they face without the Savior.

I have no evidence that any of this is true. But if it is, then we really do have memories that work both backward and forward in the most profound and powerful way.  

The believer’s joy is truly wonderful. And it can be experienced at any time, simply by remembering the happiest of times.

My childhood chum Cathy reminded me recently of one such beloved memory. It was from the '60s, and the days that she and I rode horseback together -- days when we would occasionally grab our sleeping bags and our other little friends and sleep out in the apple orchard near our barn. 

I can’t remember much of what we did during these adventures – told ghost stories, I suppose, and spied on the migrant workers' barracks and gossiped and snacked on whatever treats we had managed to lug along up the big hill and through the local Rifle Range and past the barbed wire fence encircling the orchard. But I do remember Cathy's battery-operated record player and the 45s we listened to, over and over, until the melodies and lyrics were indelibly imprinted on our lives.

There was one song in particular that to this day evokes in my heart silhouettes of stout trees and wild grass, the sound of crickets and the scent of apples and an irrepressible sense of crazy happiness and belonging – a song that now, instead of making me look back with longing, points my heart heavenward, to eternal joy. 

Here's the song. I don’t suppose it’ll mean anything to most of you, but maybe it will to a few – especially one by the name of Cathy.

When I was younger, "truth" was a personal concept meaning whatever made me happy; there were no absolutes of any kind.  For instance, when I was in my early 20s, my truth said that recreational drugs, alcohol, and tobacco were perfectly safe. That a good sex life and a high-flying career were every woman’s right. And that evolution had proven religion a crock, so let’s eat, drink and be merry, for one of these years we were all going to die!

Truth was, after all, completely subjective.

Not that I’d been born a relativist. I had once known certain things to be true – my Granny was the best, there were parts of the world where it never snowed, lying to Momma about sleeping over at Rosie’s so that we could sleep out in our back yard was very dumb, and starving children in China would be grateful for my rutabaga.
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But somewhere along the line, I had fallen for the idea that your interpretation of truth was every bit as valid as mine.

How this happened, I’m not sure. It might have had something to do with studying Russian History at UWM and doing a term paper on the Soviet definition of “Pravda,” which apparently means “truth.” In the course of researching this subject, I learned that to the Communists, truth was anything that was good for the Communist Party. To write my paper, I had to get to the point where this definition made some sense to me; maybe the mental gymnastics this exercise required had impaired my ability to recognize objective truth.

Or maybe it was the fallout from an analysis I did, for another college paper, on the Big Three news magazines’ treatment of the Thomas Eagleton affair in the 1972 presidential campaign.

“I don’t know what’s true anymore,” I’d told a classmate I’ll call Ginny on the way out of class the day we turned our papers in.

“Because Nixon won after all?” she asked, remembering that my paper had had something to do with the McGovern campaign.

I shook my head. “Because I discovered that U.S. News & World Report is the most objective of the news magazines.”

“Ha!” Ginny laughed delightedly; she was the first conservative kid I’d ever known, and I hadn’t yet taken the Econ 101 class that would show me the error of my ways. U.S. News was her magazine of choice; Time was mine. “Let’s go get a drink and you can tell me all about it,” she added.

We headed over to a dive of a bar on Oakland Avenue – one of my favorite bars, it featured a grungy atmosphere, largely disgusting clientele, and great prices.

“So tell me about it,” she said after we’d seated ourselves in a booth with our drinks – a Lite beer for me, a rum and coke for her.

“You remember Eagleton, don’t you? McGovern’s vice presidential candidate?”

She grinned and nodded. “I remember.”

“Right,” I said, wondering how someone I liked so much could have been on the wrong side in the McGovern/Nixon race. “So you remember when it came out that Eagleton had been treated for depression?”

“Yes – with electroshock, I think. Pretty scary that McGovern would choose someone with that kind of past as his running mate.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But what was scary was that at first the news media were all over McGovern for saying he would stand by Eagleton – all of them, even Time and Newsweek. U.S. News, too, of course – that was to be expected.”

“McGovern was practically a Communist,” Ginny said in apparent defense of all three magazines.

“Separate issue,” I said evenly, saving that argument for another time. “My point is that when McGovern caved in to their pressure, and replaced Eagleton with Shriver, all of a sudden the press went nuts on him for dumping on the mentally ill! All of them, that is, except for U.S. News & World Report.”

“They stuck to their guns?”

“Yes,” I admitted, though it pained me to say so. “U.S. News said that McGovern had done the right thing.”

“Objective reporting is alive and well somewhere,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Objective reporting?" What a funny thing to say. “Of course it’s alive and well. And it always will be. How can you doubt it?” 

************** 

Except I’d been horribly wrong about that; the Time and Newsweek flip-flops were just the opening salvos in the mainstream news media’s all-out attack on objective truth.

“It is not enough to refrain from publishing fake news or to take ordinary care to avoid mistakes,” said newspaper-publishing legend Joseph Pulitzer many years ago. “You’ve got to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman.”

I knew from first-hand experience what happened to a woman’s virtue. By the 1990s, the same thing had apparently befallen American journalism – in the process, nurturing a subjective, devil-may-care attitude towards truth in stony hearts like mine. 

“What is truth?” I remember thinking now and then in the tumultuous last decades of the 20th Century. Never having read the Bible, I didn’t realize that I was quoting Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea in Jesus’ day, the opportunist who had ordered Jesus’ crucifixion even though he could find no fault with his victim. 

(From Heaven Without Her, pages 88-90)

Last night, I watched the 1942 melodrama “In This Our Life,” the story of an abominably selfish and miserable young woman named Stanley (Bette Davis). Stanley remained troubled to the bitter end of the movie, in spite of the gentle intervention of her wise father. “In my day,” he commented in the midst of one of her tantrums, “we didn’t talk much about happiness. If it came, we were grateful for it. But we were brought up in the belief that there were other things more important – old fogy notions such as duty and personal responsibility.”
 
It wasn’t the first time such apparently obsolete wisdom was delivered in movies of that era. Think of Ashley Wilkes agreeing with Scarlett O’Hara that there was nothing tying him to his wife – “nothing but honor,” he said. (“Gone with the Wind,” 1939). Alas, virtues like these were routinely rejected by the heroines of such stories, and those who expressed them risked being portrayed as weak-minded and pitiable.

All of which paved the way for our modern ideas about what matters in this life.
 
In a word: me. It’s all about me. I am all that matters.
 
This notion came into its own in the 1960s, becoming the battle cry of my generation and the underlying MO of those that followed in our wake.
 
Our culture has encouraged this form of Nouveau Narcissism from the start, making it tough to resist. Consider our music, for instance. I could name a number of pertinent titles, but one of the most obvious contributors was Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.” Check out the chorus:
 
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me.
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all.
 
As if we needed advice on how to love ourselves! As the wisest man who ever lived proclaimed in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” And, in fact, self-love permeates the Bible’s accounts of man’s ancient rebellion against his Creator.
 
Modern movie-makers and songwriters have simply borrowed the same old themes, and we’ve embraced them eagerly in pursuing the same broad way to destruction. Think of “Is That All There Is?”, 1969’s musical answer to “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die (Isaiah 22:13). Or consider Sinatra’s “My Way,” a first-person version of “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6, e.g.).  
 
What’s really interesting is that all of this adds up to the fulfillment of yet another Bible prophecy. In 2 Timothy 3, the apostle Paul had this to say about our times:
 
“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves ...”
 
The good news is that there is an escape from the “all about me” path. All it takes is repentance, trust in Christ, and an act of God. 

When I was first searching for the truth about our existence, and the identity of the Being who'd made His existence so obvious through His creation, I spent months exploring the full spectrum of major worldviews. 

One of my most valuable resources during this phase of my investigation was James Sire's The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog. Sire goes into great detail about everything from Naturalism, Deism and the New Age to Hinduism, Islam and the Baha'i Faith. But he also demonstrates that there are really only two fundamental worldviews: those that say the ticket to paradise is being a good person, and the one that says the ticket is Jesus Christ. In short, there’s Christianity, and there’s everything else.

I wanted to believe something in the “everything else” department. My rationale was this: All these other religions said that it’s being a good person that gets you into heaven. My mom had been a great person, and I was planning on becoming one ASAP. So one or more of the "everything else" worldviews would bring us together again, this time forevermore -- without subjecting me, in the meantime, to what I perceived as the priggishness of Christianity.

To find the perfect match, I set up a series of mental buckets and labeled each one with the name of a major “everything else” worldview. I then set out to gather the evidence for each one. My plan was to drop each proof into the appropriate bucket and then, at some as-yet-unspecified date in the future, to sift through all these proofs and proclaim one the winner in the truth department.

Except that, hard as I searched, I found not one shred of evidence for any of them. 

“Because we have a holy book” sure doesn’t cut it. Who doesn’t?

“Because it works” is equally unremarkable. They all say that.

“Because there are so many of us” is almost laughable, given how often the majority of people are dead wrong.

Finally, I had to admit that all my "everything else" buckets were empty. Which left only the opposite worldview standing: Christianity. 

Almost reluctantly, I turned to the Bible – and was blown away by the evidence I found for its truth, particularly in the realm of science and prophecy. 

It’s been 16 years since I set out on my quest, 15 since I arrived at the only possible conclusion. If you haven’t already reached this conclusion yourself, please let me know what’s standing in your way; your eternity may well be at stake, and perhaps I can help point you in the right direction.

If you’re an obedient, gospel-sharing, Bible-believing Christian, you’ve no doubt run into this familiar challenge from scoffers: “The Bible is full of contradictions. On the one hand it says we should turn away from bad people. On the other, it says we shouldn’t judge anyone. Which is it?”
 
The short answer to such a protest is context – immediate and Bible-wide. If one faithfully studies out an alleged contradiction, he will eventually be able to resolve the issue. And in the process, he’ll gain invaluable wisdom.
 
Unfortunately, the “context” defense doesn’t seem to satisfy everyone. In such situations, it might help to use a worldly analogy.  
 
Say, for instance, that someone tells us his dog Bowser bit Joe Blow, and adds that Bowser is one good dog. Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? But suppose we dig a little and find out that Joe Blow is a veterinarian, and his owner had taken his normally benign pup into the clinic with an extremely painful dental abscess. Or maybe we learn that Joe Blow is a burglar, and Bowser was simply defending his family.
 
Whatever the explanation, we see that context has resolved an apparent contradiction.
 
A book we’re reading for adult Bible study shows how this principle can be applied to Scripture – in this case, to show how it’s possible for a believer to be both in the world and of the world.
 
"If we had only the story of Lot's life as it is told in the book of Genesis, we would never have imagined that Lot was a true believer. But 2 Peter 2 tells us three times that this conflicted, compromised man was 'righteous' -- and more, that he was 'distressed' and tormented by life in Sodom … Ironically, though Lot was revolted by Sodom, Sodom was in his soul. It is possible, then, for a believer to be distressed by the world while willfully clinging to the world." (Set Apart: Calling a Worldly Church to a Godly Life, R. Kent Hughes, 2003, p. 13)  
 
The point is that you could look at multiple biblical references to Lot and wind up being confused: With all that happened with him, how could Peter, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, call this man "righteous"? But when you look at the whole counsel of God, the answer comes into focus: Lot had not allowed himself to be fully "set apart" for God, which is the very definition of holy. Yet he was a believer, and his God-given righteousness did express itself in his refusal to participate in, or condone, Sodom’s sin.
 
There are many other biblical principles folded into these thoughts, but I think it’s a good illustration of why a scoffer can’t justify taking a couple verses out of context and saying they contradict each other. Just as we needed more information to determine how biting Bowser could possibly be called “good,” he would do well to look for more information in the face of an apparent biblical contradiction.
 
Of course, this assumes that our scoffer wants to resolve the alleged contradiction. And that's another issue entirely.