No Do-Overs

This evening, I watched the last few minutes of a re-run of the Lawrence Welk Show.  In case you don’t know, public television has been running old Welk shows for many years now, and it seems that their popularity hasn’t waned over the years.

I don’t often watch them, but when they come around and there’s nothing much else on, I enjoy the shows.  There is never anything on the shows that is off-color or something I don’t want to see, and the music is pretty good, too.

I cannot, however, listen to the closing song and credits without my mind going back to those years when I lived at home and the Welk show was on TV every Saturday evening.  Dad enjoyed the show and mom watched it as well.  Besides Gunsmoke on Saturdays, the Welk show was a staple for many years.

And when I listen to those closing credits and am carried back to that simpler time, I always get a little nostalgic and briefly long for those times again.  Dad in his chair, Mom ironing or folding clothes, and kids are in various stages of baths, bedtime, or homework.  Church is the next day, and then the week to come.  But come every Saturday night, Mr. Welk comes on and provides some diversion and a little class to this lower-middle class family.

That, of course, is a time long ago and far away.  So much water under the bridge in the intervening fifty or more years.  So many departures from what we thought we would be and do.  So many folks now gone from the face of the earth.  And all that remains of those times are the mental and emotional ties in the form of memories that are triggered with a certain smell…a certain theme song…a certain visual cue…a certain word or words spoken.

It’s easy to see how folks can dwell on such memories to the extent that they begin to live in the past.  They go retro.  It becomes a way of life for them.  It is indeed alluring to be taken back to a simpler time when there weren’t all of the pressures…all of the decisions…all of the troubles.  But it’s just like it is when we go back to our hometown for whatever reason for an hour or more.  The thought of moving back there is indeed a lure…until we go over the overpass that runs over the railroad and head out of town.  And that way of life quickly becomes a “whole ‘nuther world” that we really have no part of anymore; nor do we really wish for it.

We’re happy here.  We’re content with where God has put us.  And we’ll (hopefully) continue to make our home and be content wherever He takes us and whatever our circumstance.  There’s no going back.  There’s no do-overs.  There’s no magic time machine.  And that’s the way it should be.