THESE DAYS, IT seems like every science fiction or superhero movie involves time travel, multiple universes, or both. Characters facing disastrous circumstances in the present may journey back in time, trying to correct whatever mistakes were made in the past. Or they suddenly find themselves in a future reality, witnessing the unintended and ghastly consequences of some course of action they’ve taken in the present. As it was for Ebenezer Scrooge, that revelation of one’s future self can be just the motivation needed to change now.

Adventures in which the heroes and heroines travel through time, of course, are nothing new. The novella The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, for example, was published back in 1895. Wells, in fact, is credited with coining the phrase “time machine,” which now is so easily taken for granted by novelists, screenwriters, and their audiences.

But there’s a sense in which we are all time-travelers. Philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have written volumes about a unique characteristic we share as human beings: our time-bending imagination. We remember the past, albeit imperfectly. Our experience of the present, to some extent, is then shaped by such implicit or explicit memories. And on that basis, we can project ourselves forward into a future that hasn’t happened yet.

Think, for example, of how this works when we’ve experienced trauma in the past. The finer details of the event are drowned in a sea of negative emotion, so that only bits and fragments of scenes stand out. But our brains may hold implicit memories of which we aren’t aware. This is what happens when we say we’ve been “triggered”: something about the present moment — something which we may or may not be able to consciously identify — sets off alarm bells in our brain, and our bodies react, flooded with anxiety. And the more this happens, the worse both the present and the future will seem. We tell our life stories as tragedies: things went wrong in the past, are still wrong in the present, and will probably stay that way.

But there are positive and conscious ways to time travel as well. We don’t have to focus only on what’s wrong, but on what’s right. We can intentionally contemplate what’s gone well in the past and what may be going well now. We don’t tend to notice these things when we tell our tales of woe; we may even edit them out. But if we can remember and name what’s good in our stories, it can change how we see the future. It can help us find hope.

THROUGHOUT OUR STUDY of Micah, we’ve seen how the prophet’s words alternate between heartache and hope, with the emphasis on doom and disaster. But the book ends on a decidedly positive note. Judah and Jerusalem deserve to be punished, but God will not stay angry forever. In mercy, love, and grace, God will forgive them and heave the entire weight of their sin and guilt into the depths of the sea. The very last words of the book reinforce this theme of God’s covenant faithfulness:

You will be faithful to Jacob,
    and show love to Abraham,
as you pledged on oath to our ancestors
    in days long ago. (Mic 7:20, NIV)

Notice that Micah doesn’t pray, “You will be faithful to us” or “to our children.” Surely that’s the hope, but it’s not phrased that way. Rather, the people stand in the sandals of their most revered and representative ancestors: Abraham and Jacob. The prophet’s hope for the future, in other words, is grounded in God’s past promise to them and his continued faithfulness to that promise.

If God is to show faithful covenant love to his people now or in the future, therefore, it won’t be because they deserve it. It will be because God can be trusted to keep the promises he’s made. What the New International Version translates as “pledged on oath” is only a single word in Hebrew, a verb derived from the word for the number seven. The number seven was symbolic of fullness or completeness; to “seven oneself,” therefore, might entail repeating an oath seven times, to signify the strongest possible commitment. In English, one might say, “I swear on a stack of Bibles,” or “I swear by all that’s holy” (though if we follow the teaching of the New Testament, it would be best for us fallible and self-deluding humans not to make such oaths at all and just make a habit of speaking the truth).

God, in other words, made a covenant promise to Abraham and can be trusted to fulfill it. Micah’s final words in the book are a time-traveling prayer. In the midst of difficult circumstances in the present, he remembers God’s past faithfulness and projects that faithfulness out into the future. That is the nature of Micah’s hope, the hope he gives to those who hear or read his prophecy, the hope he gives to us.

And he does this, of course, as part of a believing community. All of us individually will go through times of struggle and difficulty. When we come together, we may bring those concerns as prayer requests, and rightly so.

But to be a community of faith also means to be a community of shared memory. We tell and retell the stories of God’s past faithfulness and imagine ourselves to be part of that story. We remember that love and mercy are of the very nature of God and always will be. How we understand and respond to the present, how we imagine the future, are shaped by how we remember the past.

It’s how we find hope, even in the midst of heartache.