"To look back is helpful, and indeed necessary, to purify our memory; but to be fixated on the past, lingering over the memory of wrongs done and endured, and judging in merely human terms, can paralyze us and prevent us from living in the present. The word of God encourages us to draw strength from memory and to recall the good things the Lord has given us. But it also asks us to leave the past behind in order to follow Jesus today and to live a new life in him." (Pope Francis) I am reminded of Lot's wife in the Book of Genesis. Though delivered by God from the destruction of Sodom, she looked back with longing. As a result, she was frozen in that past. We see the same situation in the chosen people's journey through the desert. Many kept longing for their life in Egypt rather than to live in the Lord in the present. They died in the desert and never saw the Promised Land. How often we do the same. We live in the past and not in the present moment. We let our past control us. We fail to remember the words of God through the Prophet Isaiah: "Remember not the past. See I am doing something new. Do you not perceive it?" Learn from the past but live in the present. That is all we have.