Remember.

To remember can bring about some of the most joy-filled recollections and some of the most painful images all within a matter of moments…no one puts feelings into words better than our sister, Beth Moore.  Here is a blog she posted in November of 2014, entitled “The Gift of Memory”:

I’m thinking today about the capacity to remember. With divine deliberation and unclouded foresight, the Creator chose to fashion the mind of man with memory. To be able to recollect – to re-collect images, experiences, expressions, numbers, dates, conversations, consequences, and encounters – is the champion quality of the well-functioning mind.

Maybe being around my family so much in recent days has sparked this subject in my thoughts. I cannot laugh with my daughters across the table at a restaurant without remembering them as little girls. I cannot kiss my father-in-law on his silver brow without recalling him as a man bigger than life in his mid-forties the first time Keith introduced us at a professional hockey game.

Like many of you, I have at times completely abhorred the capacity to remember. I still have flashbacks of staggering and disturbing moments in my childhood. I remember a scene in my home in my young adolescence that still causes the hair to stand up on the back of my neck. A song from the 70’s can still stir up the ache of a break up with a first love. To me, perhaps the worst of all dimensions of memory is regret. Regret is the excruciating recollection of all the decisions I could have made a different way. It’s the acrid memory that no one else assigned me. It’s mine alone to own. That I find the hardest of all. I have hated the capacity to remember so much that, at times in my life, I’ve held my head with both hands and yelled, “Stop it!” 

But today I’m thinking to myself that all the torturous memories I’ve stacked up like past-due library books on the bedside table of five decades are worth the capacity to recall moments that make life on this earth worth the trouble…read more from Beth Moore.  

I love that, and man, can I relate.   I remember where my feet have walked and all the muddy footprints those steps left on many people I love most.  But the beauty of remembering is Him–it is to remember where His footprints over took mine.  It’s remembering what He saved me from and called me to.  It’s looking back to see that He set my feet on a firm path and leads in paths of righteousness for His namesake.

We will never forget.  Lord, Jesus, I remember and I am thankful.