lOOKing BACK
"It was not my desire for darkness that led me away from God. It was the pain."
I read that sentence recently, and it stopped me in my tracks.
Because if I'm honest, there have been seasons where it wasn't rebellion that caused me to pull away from God. It wasn't that I stopped loving Him. It was that I didn't know what to do with my pain.
Pain from unanswered prayers.
Pain from disappointment.
Pain from relationships that ended.
Pain from church hurt.
Pain from dreams that seemed to die.
I kept bringing it to God, believing that eventually something would click, that one day the weight would disappear and everything would make sense. But healing didn't happen overnight. Instead, I found myself doing something I think many of us do when we're hurting.
Looking back.
Looking back to old relationships, old churches, old conversations, old identities, and old dreams. Not because I necessarily wanted them back, but because pain has a strange way of making the familiar feel safer than the unknown.
Psychologists have observed this through Attachment Theory, which teaches that we are wired for connection from the moment we're born. But one of its sobering implications is that we don't only attach ourselves to what is healthy; we often attach ourselves to what is familiar. We can become emotionally connected to places, people, and patterns that are hurting us simply because they've become our normal.
Our brains and nervous systems also prefer predictability. Researchers sometimes describe this as uncertainty avoidance, our natural tendency to choose the known over the unknown. Familiarity often feels like safety, even when it isn't. That helps explain why people return to unhealthy relationships, dysfunctional churches, destructive habits, or old versions of themselves. It isn't always because they want dysfunction.
Sometimes it's because uncertainty feels more frightening than familiarity. The Bible doesn't ignore this reality—it speaks directly to it. The story of Lot's wife is not simply a warning against looking back; it's an invitation to examine how our hearts become attached to places God is calling us to leave. But before we arrive at that moment, we first have to understand how Lot ended up in Sodom.
Genesis 13 tells us that Lot looked over the land and "chose for himself." There is no indication that God led him toward Sodom. The land simply looked better (it made logistical sense), it was more fertile, more prosperous, more promising. It was a reasonable decision.
And that's often how compromise begins. Usually, through choices that simply make sense in the moment.
A relationship that seems promising.
A career opportunity.
A church.
A friendship.
A coping mechanism.
None of these choices feel dangerous at first. But over time, they begin shaping us. Psychologists call this environmental conditioning. The environments we repeatedly inhabit slowly shape our beliefs, habits, expectations, and even our identity. Scripture has been saying something similar for thousands of years: we become like what we continually dwell among. One day we wake up and quietly ask,
"How did I get here?"
What amazes me most about this story isn't Lot's poor decisions. It's God's response. Genesis 19:16 says, "But he hesitated. So the men seized his hand...for the LORD was merciful to them."
Lot hesitated. Why? Because leaving isn't just about changing locations. It's about releasing attachments. Psychologists describe this through identity attachment. We don't just become attached to people or places; we become attached to who we are within them.
Leaving a relationship often means grieving the version of yourself that existed in that relationship.
Leaving a church means grieving the identity and community you thought would last forever.
Leaving an addiction means learning who you are without the thing that once comforted you.
Sometimes we're not just losing a place. We're losing a version of ourselves. No wonder Lot hesitated. And yet God's mercy moved before Lot's obedience. He was rescued before he was fully ready to leave. Then comes one of the shortest and most sobering verses: "But Lot's wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt."
At first glance, that seems like such a small act. Just one look, but this wasn't a casual glance. Because while her feet had left Sodom, her heart had not.
Psychology offers an interesting parallel. Researchers describe something called Rosy Retrospection, a cognitive bias in which we remember the past more positively than we actually experienced it. We unconsciously soften painful memories while highlighting comforting ones.
That's why former relationships can suddenly seem perfect.
Why unhealthy churches begin to feel like "the good old days."
Why seasons we once begged God to end somehow become the seasons we miss the most.
Our memories are remarkably selective. We don't remember everything. We remember what our hearts still long for. I wonder if Lot's wife wasn't longing for Sodom's wickedness. Perhaps she was remembering her home. The life she had built there. The tragedy wasn't simply that she looked back. The tragedy was that she valued what she was losing more than what God was saving her for.
Another psychological principle helps explain this. Behavioral economists call it loss aversion. Simply put, human beings experience the pain of losing something more intensely than the joy of gaining something new. Even if the future is objectively better, our emotions often magnify what we're leaving behind.
That explains why freedom can feel painful. Why healing can feel lonely. Why surrender feels like loss before it feels like life. It's why Israel wanted to go back to Egypt. Slavery was terrible. But it was predictable. Freedom required trust, and trust requires faith.
I've realized something over the last year. Our hearts often release things more slowly than our feet do. I physically left the relationship, the church, the friendships, but emotionally, I kept looking back. I replayed conversations. Wondered what could have been different. Romanticized seasons God had called me out of. Then one night I had a dream.
In the dream, I was standing in a parking lot I didn't recognize with a group of men I knew. Parked beside us was a large box truck, and for some reason, everyone unanimously decided that I should be the one to drive it. I immediately resisted. I remember thinking, They're the men. Surely one of them should drive, why me?
But they all insisted that I was the right person for the job, that I was capable of doing what was being asked of me. So I climbed into the driver's seat. My hands were sweating. I felt completely overwhelmed by the responsibility.
As I began backing out of the parking space, I accidentally hit a black pickup truck. The driver stepped out. He was large, intimidating, and furious. He grabbed me by the neck, pinned me against the truck, and began yelling at me. Oddly, I wasn't afraid.
When I woke up, one detail kept replaying in my mind. I didn't move forward. I reversed. That image became a mirror.
How often do we do the same thing?
When God calls us into a new season, a new responsibility, a new level of trust, our instinct is often to retreat toward what is familiar. Psychologists describe this through uncertainty avoidance. Human beings naturally prefer the predictable over the unknown, even when the unknown holds growth. Our nervous systems often interpret unfamiliarity as danger, causing us to instinctively move back toward what we've always known.
Looking back isn't always a conscious act of rebellion. Sometimes it's an instinctive response to fear.
Yet the story of Lot reminds us that God doesn't wait until we're fearless before leading us. In fact, Genesis says that when Lot hesitated, the Lord, in His mercy, took him by the hand. Perhaps that's the invitation for all of us. Not to pretend we're unafraid.
But to trust that God's presence is more dependable than the familiarity we're tempted to return to.
There’s this scripture of Jesus's fascinating, the bible legit has him quoted saying, "Remember Lot's wife."
He doesn't say that because her story is unusual. He says it because her temptation is universal. We all have something we're tempted to preserve. Maybe that’s A relationship. A dream. A wound. An identity. A season. An Addiction. An old version of ourselves.
Yet the invitation of Jesus isn't simply to leave something behind. It's to become attached to Someone greater.mThe Apostle Paul writes in Philippians 3, "Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on..." Christian maturity isn't pretending the past didn't matter. It's allowing our deepest attachment to shift.
The goal isn't to become detached people. It's becoming rightly attached to people. Attached to Christ. Because whatever we are most attached to will ultimately shape the direction of our lives.
Perhaps that's why Jesus continually invited people to follow Him, not merely because He wanted obedience. But because He knew the human heart always attaches itself to something.
The question isn't whether you'll be attached. The question is: To whom? To what?
When Christ becomes our deepest attachment, every other attachment begins to find its proper place. That's why we can finally move forward.
Not because the past wasn't painful.
Not because we suddenly forget.
