Thread / Last year, planning to leave a place we loved, @mitnollam and I clung to:

“The mature are not nostalgic, they are pressing on,” from @rayortlund

And “Say not, ‘why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this,” in Ecclesiastes 7

So David Gibson’s treatment of nostalgia in “Living Life Backwards: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End” is particularly relevant and meaningful to me, a summer later:

“Nostalgia is a form of escapism by taking a vacation in the past instead of grappling with the present or looking to the future in faith.” — Gibson, “Living Life Backwards,” p.102

“Nostalgia is something that affects all of us, not just older people looking back wistfully at their youth... have you ever stopped to think about the feeling of nostalgia and what it actually is?” — Gibson, “Living Life Backwards,” p.102

“C.S. Lewis said that nostalgia is the special emotion of longing, and it is always bittersweet .. we experience a feeling of something lost, and yet at the same time it is a beautiful perception of what has been lost, and so we long for it.” —Gibson, p.102

“Now here’s what Lewis says: only children or the emotionally immature think that what they are longing for is actually what they are longing for ... when you mature, you realize nostalgia plays a kind of trick on you.” —Gibson, p.102

“When you experience nostalgia, your heart is longing for a more beautiful person than you have ever met or a more beautiful place than you have ever known. You think you’re longing for the past, but the past was never as good as your mind was telling you it was.” Gibson, p.103

“..God is giving you in that moment one of the most profound glimpses of the intensity of perfection and beauty that you have actually yet to see.” —Gibson, p.103

“What is in fact pulling on your heartstrings is the future: it’s heaven; it’s your sense of home and belonging that has just cracked the surface of your life, for just a moment, and then is gone.” —Gibson, p.103

“..when we get that flashing moment of nostalgia, it’s like tiny pinpricks of that eternal home breaking through into our present life. Wise people who understand how God has made us to long for him and for heaven don’t look backward when they get nostalgic.” -Gibson, p.103

“They allow the feeling to point forward. They look up to heaven and home.”

—Gibson, p.103