day no. 17,425: new heights or new lows?

"Have you ever seen a fellow fail at the high jump because he had not gone far enough back for his run? That is Modern Thought. It is so confident of where it is going to that it does not know where it comes from." — G.K. Chesterton,  The Illustrated London News (1914)

If you refuse to look back, you cannot advance. Progress requires a reference point. If you merely seek to rewind the tape to a previous point, you will get the same result. You must begin somewhere else if you desire to end somewhere different. If you don't like the final scene, it does you no good to select a scene from earlier that you liked better. The story will end the same way. 

To put a finer point on it, if we do not go back to the Garden, we will continue to end up in Gomorrah. When we forget the Fall, we will always fall. If we ignore where we were before we fell and what we were doing before that, we will always walk off the edge and end up in the valley of humiliation.

Modern thought wants to lower the bar, but godly thought wants to raise it. In Christ, we can clear the requirements of God, but outside of Him, we can only fall short of our highest aspirations, regardless of how low we go. When we aspire to new heights, we fall to new lows.