2. A Roaring Voice " T H E P A S T! THE PAST! The Past! the past! thepast! ... " (slowly fading away)

In my class "Mississippi History" we covered some weeks ago the encounter of the first European with the Indian tribes of today's area of Mississippi. This was somewhere in the 1540s and this guy was from Spain and called Hernando DeSoto (I really like the sound of this name!). Well, dear and nice DeSoto wasn't dear and nice at all because he used some very unkind means or torturing people (cutting their tongues, sometimes even heads) in order to get information about places where the huge amounts of gold could be found he was searching for (actually, it's a good question how people should answer his investigations if he had cout out their tongue! But that's the topic of maybe another entry).
However, DeSoto returned to Europe in 1542 and even though he was a really bad and crazy person, it wasn't actually him who was the most severe disaster and catastrophe for these tribes. It was the diseases he brought over from Europe - probably not by any intent (kids, NEVER forget to wash your hands before lunch, ok?)! The Natives' immune system never had to pay attention before to such kind of germs - and the result was that about 90% of the people had died when a French guy (who answered to the nice name René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle) came to this area 140 years later. This already being crazy enough, the people who had survived had completely forgot about their past, their culture, their customs, why they had built these mounds, and even that their own ancestors had built them! They had forgot everything!

That reminded me of what I had written the other day when we were asked by Mr. Howell what education is and what's the reason of it. One of my thoughts was that education is learning from the past. Things that had a really bad outcome, you probably won't do again - ok, at least you shouldn't! But there are other things that went pretty well and you might want to repeat them.
There are people who wish for a new start in their life - I guess sometimes if some really bad things have happended this wish is understandable. But, just try to imagine what your life would look like, if you had to restart it every new day: Imagine how many people you hadn't met before! Your best friend you're together with since kindergarten. Imagine that you weren't allowed to drive a car because you hadn't taken your driving license.
Ok, that was more of the fun stuff. But imagine that you would have to fight your way through life again every single day. You wouldn't know where Jennings is or that you live in the U.S.
You wouldn't be able to learn from your faults in the past because there would be no past at all and you were condemned and cursed to do these faults again and again. Every single stupid word that comes from your lips and hurts your friend. Imagine there would be another Hilter - because nobody had experienced the first one and all his cruelties!
Yes, I do think that this is a curse!

I never want to be without memories of the past. I would be especially sorry about all the good experiences I had in my youth, at highschool, ...

Jesus forgives our sins and doesn't look to the past. They are gone and he will never again rub them in your face saying "See what you done!" He forgives AND forgets! That is the good thing about forgetting the past.
But we are to learn from the past and try to behave better, trust more, and becoming more like Jesus himself. And that's the blessing we have from the past: it won't count, but it's a really valuable thing.
So I'll try to learn from it. Will you join me?