It’s a strange paradox that remembering is vital to our forward movement as human beings – physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
A person who suffers a traumatic brain injury must be re-taught how to do simple movements he or she learned as an infant and toddler. His or her brain and muscles need to remember how the body is designed to function.
The same is true for our souls and spirits. Over and over in the Old and New Testaments, God reminded the fledgling Hebrew nation, “Remember….Lot’s wife” (Luke17:32); “….the works of the Lord” (Psalm 77:11); “….to magnify [My] work” (Job 36:24); “….and do all My commandments” (Numbers 16:40); “….His covenant forever” (I Chron. 16:15). And these are just a few of the commands to “Remember….”
Revisiting memories is essential for healing of the past, for growth, and for training our emotional and spiritual muscles to form healthy patterns.
Israeli Yaron Reshef discovered this principle inadvertently. A book entitled Out of the Shoebox,* published by the author in 2014, recounts Reshef’s unexpected journey toward rediscovering a father who had disappeared from his life 56 years earlier.
“I could not create a complete picture of [my father] in my mind,” Reshef writes. His mother, sister and other relatives seldom mentioned the man, or told stories about him. Gradually, any memories Reshef had faded into obscurity.
Then one day in 1967 Reshef’s mother brought out a wooden box containing old postcards, letters and photographs.
“Though I took in every written word, and scanned to memory and mind every single picture, I let this discovery get pushed back and forgotten. As I closed the lid of that box, I put the lid on those memories for many years. Maybe because I found it hard to see my mother suffering, when I realized how difficult it was for her to speak of the past. Or maybe because it was all so inextricably intertwined with the memories of my father, a memory I was busy repressing….At eighteen I wasn’t wise…sensitive, strong, brave nor mature enough to…ask…questions I want to ask today, but there’s no one left to ask.”
But in 2011 Reshef received information about a plot of land his father had purchased in Haifa, Israel – a plot about which he, his father’s heir, needed to make some decisions. He was intrigued.
“The tale of the lot removed the lid from the box. This time, I was ready to face the memories…. During the year of my quest…I kept thinking that I was looking not only for the lot in this puzzle but for my father’s story, and with it, the story of the family I never got to know….”
Reshef’s discovery taught him a huge lesson.
“Memories should be nurtured,” he wrote. “That’s the only way to preserve them. And nurturing them is done through a story that breathes life and validity into them. You relate the memories, and they return the favor by growing stronger and finding a safe, permanent spot in your consciousness, until they become part of you.”
“Until they become part of you.”
It’s a lesson God’s Word still teaches us today. Remembering our Father’s actions and His unfailing, thousand-generation love in the past – in human history, in the history of the nation we claim as ours, in the history of our community of faith, in the history of the family in which we’ve been reared, in our personal spiritual walk – is vital to our forward movement as human beings, “until they become part of us.”
“Because God’s word has spoken to us in history and thus in the past, the remembrance and repetition of what we have learned is a necessary daily exercise,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “Every day we must turn again to God’s acts of salvation, so that we can again move forward…. Faith and obedience live on remembrance and repetition (emphasis mine). Remembrance becomes the power of the present because of the living God who once acted for me and who reminds me of that today.”**
So remember. Savor those old photos, family histories and mementoes. Rejoice daily in God’s provisions, past and present. Celebrate how His Word has affected you at life’s pivotal moments. Recall your failures and successes in the journey of obedience.
And tell those stories to your biological, adopted, and spiritual children.
Until they become part of you – and them..
*Out of the Shoebox, Yaron Reshef, c. 2014.
** God Is in the Manger, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, c. 2010.
