When Celebration Looks Forward, Not Back

Sometimes an anniversary invites us to look back.

But what happens when an anniversary feels like a time not to look back but to look forward?

Culturally and socially, we mark occasions as a way to remember. Birthdays, anniversaries, memorials. These moments are meant to help us honour what has been.

Recently I bumped into a couple enjoying a day out here in the Barossa. They told me about their son who lives in Germany. Not far from where he lives is one of the largest cemeteries in the world, and at its heart are the plaques for those who lost their lives in the Holocaust. They described the building with such awe immense, stretching for miles, so large that visitors take buses to move around the site. In the centre of it all, school children regularly come to care for the grounds.

As they spoke, they were filled with wonder at the scale and the heritage.

Yet, if I’m honest, I felt something different stirring in me.

I couldn’t help but think about how trauma moves through generations. How memory, when carried in certain ways, can sometimes bind people to the past rather than free them from it. Those children returning again and again to care for a place of such sorrow

I wondered what that does to a young nervous system.

Whether the message becomes;

you must never forget… how dare you forget.

And I found myself wondering whether, over time, ritual can sometimes lose the very meaning it once held.

It made me think of the word amen. Originally a word of deep trust and affirmation meaning it is reliable, it is true.

Yet today it often simply signals the end of a prayer, something we say almost automatically.

Repetition can sometimes empty meaning instead of deepening it.

And I began to wonder…

Do we do this in other ways too?

This week marks a pivotal anniversary for us our 20th.

My first instinct was to reflect on the journey. To recall where we began and everything that happened along the way.

But if I’m really honest… it was a hard journey.

Opposition from the beginning. Matt’s mother trying every possible way to make sure we wouldn’t work. Then all the bumps and hurdles that followed.

Years of navigating what it meant to become us.

So I paused and asked myself:

Do I really want to look back and measure how long it took us to arrive at peace at this place where we finally feel content, settled, truly one?

And strangely, that conversation in the Barossa came back to me.

Perhaps celebrating doesn’t have to be about looking back.

Perhaps celebrating can be about something else entirely.

Maybe celebration is about honouring the moment we stand in now… and the new chapter that lies ahead.

Because if there is one thing I care deeply about both in my work and in life it is breaking cycles.

So maybe I start here.

Celebrating not what has been, but what is unfolding.

A new season.
A new chapter.
A quiet excitement for what possibilities lie ahead.

Because we are never defined by what has been.

We are shaped in the present, in the awareness of now.
Now with each other Now in this moment.

And perhaps this is exactly what we are called to remember.

As written in Isaiah 43:18-19

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

And again in Ecclesiastes 7:10

Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.

Maybe somewhere along the way society forgot this wisdom.

That remembering is important but dwelling there is not where life grows.

So if, like me, you have sometimes held the past a little too tightly, perhaps this is a gentle reminder:

It is still okay to celebrate.

But perhaps we celebrate what is to come.

Because maybe this is how cycles change not by endlessly revisiting the past, but by consciously stepping into something new.

And as Ecclesiastes reminds us:

To everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose under heaven.

A time to plant, and a time to harvest.
A time to break down, and a time to build up.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh.
A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

And perhaps this season… is one of building.

My prayer is simple.

That God watches over this next chapter of our lives together and that we are blessed to celebrate many more seasons to come.