Do you enjoy history?  Many schoolchildren do not.  Many do not enjoy memorizing names, places, and dates connected to times that, to them, seem too long ago, spending many hours listening to lengthy lectures about subjects that seem wholly foreign to their experience, or working on various essays about selected dimensions of a past that, to them, is not worth their time, so far removed they are, it seems, from the year 2024.

    Maybe, however, this is the problem.  The past will never be the present.  But without the past, we would not have the present.  We cannot be creatures of the present without understanding the past, cannot be here without once being "there."  On the other hand, taken out of context or thrust into the present with no boundaries, much of the past can indeed seem irrelevant to the present moment.

    Consider our lives.  Are they not akin to a story?  Are they not like a narrative of moments, days, months, and years, a narrative that we weave, consciously or not, each passing second?  So it is with history.  Though those who lived many years before us do not know it now, what they did, how they spent their time each day, however long ago, laid the groundwork, in a number of ways, large and small, for how we spend our time today.  Everyone is important, everyone matters, everything counts.
    

    And that's the point.  Everything counts.  It is not "history" that we are after, but rather the stories that comprise it.  We are stories, eternally significant stories, in the making.  In addition, we are stories within other stories, stories within a grander narrative still, the narrative of creation, time, and eternity, the narrative of God.
    

    That, in the long run, is what history is all about.