Intersections: Where Faith Meets Life – by Bob Weathers

Students at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina are rebuilding the past. Well, not exactly rebuilding it. More like replicating it.

Bob Weathers

With students from Arkansas State, they are creating 3-D digital replicas of famous sites of ancient Greece and Rome. These digital images will be accessible to anyone through the Internet, allowing people to actually rotate a replica and see it from every angle. Currently, serious scholars and armchair archaeologists alike do not have access to such a research tool without traveling to California, where UCLA houses the only digital, 3-D replicas of such places. But the students of CCU hope to break new ground by offering these replicas to the whole world.

For example, not long from now you might be able to immerse yourself in a panoramic photo presentation of the Temple of Apollo or the Sanctuary of Athena, taking a trip 2,300 years into the past without ever leaving the comfort of your own computer.

But then, we never have to travel far to replicate the past. We house in our minds perfect panoramic views of our pains and heartaches, of our old sins and mistakes. Now and then we visit them and replay the replica. We immerse ourselves in our failures and even reactivate the pain. We rotate the images and circulate within the events so we can see them from every angle.

So how do you step away from the 3-D, graphic image of the past that you have erected and stored in your memory for so long? The Bible gives us some sound advice. It teaches that we do not blanket over the past, but we do not replicate it either.

First, practice forgiveness. Paul wrote that we should actively be “forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). That means that God has forgiven you, which is reason enough to let the past go, and it also means that his forgiveness should compel you to forgive others.

Second, refuse to rewind. Stop replicating the past and start living in God’s forgiveness and love for today. We must make that choice. Paul decided that he would live “forgetting what is behind and straining forward to what is ahead” (Philippians 4:13).

You can, too. Just make that choice. And stop replicating the past.