FOR A NEW YEAR: Leave the Past Buried
Richard Leslie Parrott, Ph.D.
Two neighbor women who have been feuding for weeks finally made up. That very afternoon, the dog of one of them women is found in the backyard with the neighbor’s rabbit in his mouth. The rabbit is dead. The woman is horrified, “We have just made up after our feud, what am I going to do?”
The woman gently takes the rabbit into her house. There, she washes, blow-dries, and fluffs the dead rabbit’s hair. Secretly, she slips into the neighbor’s backyard and puts the rabbit back in the rabbit hutch.
No more than thirty minutes later, she hears a horrible scream from the woman next door. She runs over and hears her neighbor exclaim, “I don’t know what happened. Our rabbit died three days ago and we buried it, but here it is back in its hutch.”
As you enter the New Year, it is often best to let the past be buried. You can’t keep digging it up, washing it up, fluffing it up, and thinking you can make it alive again. Here is a motto for entering the New Year: “Press on.”
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me (Philippians 3:12).