"when it's over, is it really over?"

i find it intriguing that you can learn so much from an experience while you're in it...and then once it's over, you can learn something new each time you look back on it. i suppose that's because each time you look back on it, you have grown...you're a slightly different person...you have new perspectives on it. but it just never ceases to amaze me that the Lord can use your past to teach you just as well as He can use your present. there are so many things in my life that i look back on now and, because of the cumulative growth from the past (nearly) 19 years, see something totally different than what i saw at first viewing. it's kind of like watching your favorite childhood movie when you've "grown up" a bit more.

take the original BBC Chronicles of Narnia movies, for example. as a child, i was hooked on those films, even though they were 3 hours long EACH. i was hooked on them because of the storyline, i suppose...i'm still hooked on the books. really great story. but anyway...i tried to watch one of them a couple of months ago for the first time in probably a decade. i realized for the first time how awfully the story was depicted, how foul the acting was, the huge lack of any kind of meaningful soundtrack...etc. the list could go on and on. my point being...when i was a kid i didn't know the story could be depicted more than one way. i couldn't process the fact that it might be different...i just loved the story. i didn't know what bad acting was. i hadn't become accustomed to films with excellent music in the background. now, i can honestly say that in my opinion, those versions of the movies were rather awfully done. but no matter...the story remains. and i learn from it. :)

so maybe that was a bad example of what's going through my mind. i'm really bad at stringing my thoughts together, and even worse at making coherent analogies...so forgive me. i'm tired. :P