Do you remember election night 1988? Do you remember that historic race for the White House between Michael Dukakis, Democratic governor of Massachusetts and Republican Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush? If you do remember, you probably recall the infamous "Willie Horton" ad. You probably recall the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU". Remember Democrat VP candidate Lloyd Benson's debate with the GOP VP candidate Dan Quayle and his comment, "Senator Quayle, I knew Jack Kennedy, and you're no Jack Kennedy."?
Since I am discussing your memory, I want you to think about your feelings that night. Remember when they were calling various states for the two candidates how you felt when California was called for Dukakis? Did you shout for joy or did you hang your head? Did you exclaim "thank God for the Left Coast!" or did you say "well what do you expect from the land of fruits and nuts!"? When California was called for Dukakis were you thrilled at the prospect of your candidate winning the fifty-five electoral college votes it provided to him or were you devastated knowing that winning California gave Dukakis a tremendous advantage?
Were you able to get a sense of how you felt that night? The funny thing is, if you recall feeling angst about Dukakis winning California or you remember excitement, your memory has failed you. The reality is this: California did not vote to send a liberal governor from Massachusetts to live on Pennsylvania Avenue. California voted for George HW Bush.
The reason I was able to pull a cheap stunt on you like the above is because our ability to remember is frequently flawed. When we try to recall the past we have a tendency to make mistakes about details and feelings, facts and emotions. And in the same way we are prone to error when attempting to predict the facts about the future and how we will feel about the condition, the emotions and the details of tomorrow.
Right now some young man is getting a skull and crossbones tattoo on his arm with the ageless motto DEATH ROCKS emblazened underneath it. Right now he thinks this is a good idea. Right now his vision of the future is one of having a sense of pride and happiness about the body art being injected under his skin. He can't imagine changing his mind about this decision, nor can he fathom that at the age of 80 he will probably not think too fondly of impending death.
I recently passed a billboard advertising a tattoo removal business. Evidently someone who had "I love Harriet" tattooed on their shoulder made a grave error in judgment about the future (not to mention Harriet) and consequently regretted the decision to have her name forever embedded into his body for all the world to see. With the rise in the popularity of tattoos has come a whole new industry of fixing the consequences of poor judgments about the future. Our inability to accurately predict what we will want and feel in the future, about what will happen and what will be the consequences of our choices is a real problem for us. Fortunately tattoos can be removed. Unfortunately most poor choices have a point of no return with irrevocable consequences.
Remembering the past incorrectly can be easily adjusted with eyewitness accounts, written histories, and the truth about what took place. Poor eyesight can be easily adjusted with contacts or glasses. A flawed vision of the future is a much more complicated issue. Predicting the future is a tough business. It's also big business. The whole gambling industry is built on the belief that most people are wrong about the future, whether it's which horse will win the race, which team will win the game, or which numbers will show up in the lottery drawing, the roulette wheel or the slot machine.
That puts us in a risky position. That makes decision making really scary. Choices about whom to marry, where to live, how to raise children, what career path to take, where to go to church, how to spend money, and a list of many other choices greatly influence our futures and whether we will be successful and happy or failures and full of regret. Some folks decide not to choose. Some folks decide to avoid making mistakes about the future by circumnavigating the whole decision making process altogether. But not making a decision is a decision in and of itself. Yes, there are consequences even for the "non-choices" in life.
The fact is we have to make choices. And since we are all headed unavoidably toward the future, shouldn't we try to make the best choices as possible? Do we just roll the dice and hope we get lucky? Do we embrace the notion of fate and resign ourselves to the idea that success or failure is essentially a coin toss? Is there some other way to get a peek into the future to help us determine what choices are best for us and what decisions will help us secure a satisfying tomorrow?
There are two ways to learn: firsthand knowledge or secondhand knowledge. Most everything that we know today is secondhand. Somebody told us. Somebody showed us. Somebody taught us. We learned it in school. We learned it by reading a book. We learned it through oral histories. We went to a museum. We visited a battlefield. We watched a documentary or a biography. The average Junior High student knows more about the world and the universe than the great minds of history. It's an amazing fact: most fourteen year olds know more than Aristotle, Galileo, Leonardo and the other great people of history. How? Through the discoveries that each one made, passed down from generation to generation, building upon each other's understanding and setting the stage for future generations to learn more.
Fortunately there is a simple solution.
I Corinthians 10:11-12 (NLT) says "All these events happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us, who live at the time when this age is drawing to a close.
If you think you are standing strong, be careful, for you, too, may fall into the same sin." The Message translation says "These are all warning markers—danger!—in our history books, written down so that we don't repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel—they at the beginning, we at the end—and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were. Don't be so naive and self-confident. You're not exempt. You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else. Forget about self-confidence; it's useless. Cultivate God-confidence."
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