I dare you to remember

After everyone had fun floating in the sky with balloons in the movie Mary Poppins Returns, I believe it was Mary Poppins herself who said, “Of course, the adults will forget it all by tomorrow”. Everyone always grows up and forgets the adventures Mary Poppins took them on. I’m not saying Mary Poppins is scripture but there is some truth in what she said.

Is it arrogance? Is it worry, busyness, anxiety or success? I don’t know what’s the cause but we humans have a memory problem. (It is this same ability to forget so quickly that many in government and media love so much. Make the people forget that they are angry; distract them).

I even forgot the sunrise

When I was drowning in the waters of doubt, I forgot so much. I forgot who God is, what he means to me and what he has done for me. I forgot the transformation his word had done in my life, I forgot the miracles I had seen him perform, the wonders of his majesty and his love. I even forgot the sunrise.

One day, after about two months of pushing my head above water for air, I remembered: Isn’t he the one who did this….? I found it hard to believe the details of my own memory, believing they were somehow corrupted. Then I also remembered that I was a writer. So, I went in search of my old journals going four years back. I found that far from being untrue, the reality of what happened was more wonderous than my memories.

In Deuteronomy, throughout God’s message to the Israelites in the wilderness – after they had been rescued from Egypt – he urges them to remember. Don’t forget. Remember what I have done for you. Pass it on to your children so they will tell the next generation. Remember…

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Now I get what he was talking about. We have weak minds. These same people made a golden calf for themselves to worship. Their leader, Moses, has been gone for some time and they began to feel abandoned. So, the Israelites decided that the solution to their problem was to create an idol for themselves. Thus, the calf.

This was after they saw the Red Sea divide into two so they could walk on dry ground, for goodness’ sake! How could they do this? They might have felt abandoned by Moses but their despair led them to forget God’s wonders and abandoned their creator.

It has always been easy to look at the ancient Israelites as ridiculous but really, we are all the same. Fear, hunger, pride, worries of today and tomorrow – all these mess up our memories.

Why would the disciples ever forget you?

“Do this in remembrance of me”, Jesus said at the Last Supper. I would think to myself, why would the disciples ever forget you?

Then again, less than 24 hours after that, Peter denied that he knew Jesus and the other disciples ran away when Jesus was arrested. The disciples – who walked with Jesus for three years – forgot whom they had been following. So yeah, sharing bread and wine together to help us remember Jesus’ sacrifice sounds like a great idea.

Right, this is where I am trying to get to: Somehow, almost all (if not all) of us have felt the hand of God at some point in time in our lives, but we forget it. A lot of the time, the forgetting is instantaneous once another circumstance of life – good or bad, trivial or serious – presents itself. Once in a while when this memory pops up, we rationalise it, knock it down, put it aside as irrelevant, never truly remembering what happened and what that memory meant to us.

Now, I dare you to allow yourself to remember. Pick up a pen, count the blessings and wonders you have witnessed, and thank him.

I will never forget this awful time,
    as I grieve over my loss.
Yet I still dare to hope
    when I remember this:
The faithful love of the Lord never ends!
    His mercies never cease.
Lamentations 3:20-22 (NLT)