So, if history is this important — and it surely is — what did Lot’s wife do that was so wrong?
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Apparently what was wrong with Lot’s wife is that she wasn’t just looking back, but that in her heart she wanted to go back.
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It is possible that Lot’s wife looked back with resentment toward the Lord for what He was asking her to leave behind.
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So it isn’t just that she looked back; she looked back longingly. In short, her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future.
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The past is to be learned from but not lived in. We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we experienced, then we look ahead, we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future — faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives. So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she had.
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There is something in us, at least in too many of us, that particularly fails to forgive and forget earlier mistakes in life — either mistakes we ourselves have made or the mistakes of others. That is not good. It is not Christian. It stands in terrible opposition to the grandeur and majesty of the Atonement of Christ. To be tied to earlier mistakes — our own or other people’s — is the worst kind of wallowing in the past from which we are called to cease and desist.
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Perhaps at this beginning of a new year there is no greater requirement for us than to do as the Lord Himself said He does: “Behold, he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more” (D&C 58:42). The proviso, of course, is that repentance has to be sincere, but when it is and when honest effort is being made to progress, we are guilty of the greater sin if we keep remembering and recalling and rebashing someone with their earlier mistakes, and that “someone” might be ourselves.
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Forgive, and do that which is harder than to forgive. Forget. And when it comes to mind, forget it again. You can remember just enough to avoid repeating the mistake, but put the rest of it on the dung heap Paul spoke of to those Philippians. Dismiss the destructive and keep dismissing it, until the beauty of the Atonement of Christ has revealed to you your bright future, and the bright future of your family and your friends and your neighbors. God doesn’t care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are, and with His help, where you are willing to go.
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This is an important matter to consider at the start of a new year — and every day ought to be the start of a new year and a new life.
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Somewhere on that path we stopped and wondered what we had gotten ourselves into. Life that day seemed overwhelming, and the undergraduate plus graduate years we still had before us seemed monumental, nearly insurmountable.
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On a spot which I could probably still mark for you today, I turned to Pat and said something like, “Should we give up? I can get a good job and carve out a good living for us. I can do okay without a degree. Should we stop trying to tackle what right now seems so difficult to face?” In my best reenactment of Lot’s wife I said, in effect, “Let’s go back. Let’s go home. The future holds nothing hopeful for us.”
Then my beloved little bride did what she has done for 45 years since then. She grabbed me by the lapels and said, “We are not going back. We are not going home. The future holds everything hopeful for us.”
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Will I be safe? Will life be sound? Can I trust in the Lord and in the future? Or would it be better to look back, to go back, to go home?
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To all such of every generation I call out, “Remember Lot’s wife.” Faith is for the future. Faith builds on the past but never longs to stay there. Faith trusts that God has great things in store for each of us and that Christ is the “high priest of good things to come.”
Excerpts from Elder Holland’s talk on Lot’s wife and looking to the future with faith.
via LDS Church News – Elder Jeffrey R. Holland: Remember Lot’s wife.