Remembering

by Ed Harrell
via "Remembering," Christianity Magazine 2:1, January 1985, p. 32

Cluttered with a record of every trivial encounter of our experience, our minds have a very limited capacity to call most of that memory to the conscious surface. Most of us remember very little about our past…None of us could reconstruct with any accuracy a week out of our lives twenty years ago.

For the most part, we remember only particularly poignant moments in our experience—some of them times of momentous social import and some profoundly private. I remember Pearl Harbor, sitting intently before a huge old cabinet radio, listening to the news of the bombing. I remember being interrupted in the midst of a class at East Tennessee State University to be told that John F. Kennedy had been shot. I remember saying “I do” in a little church in Russellville, Kentucky, and I remember sitting on the fantail of a destroyer in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean in the absolute peace and serenity of a hushed sunset—lost in the mellowest of meditation…

But for a Christian, there are no memories that rival our spiritual recollections. God intended for those memories to strengthen us. Hebrews 10:32 states: 'But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were illuminated, ye endured a great fight of affliction.'

Probably no moment stands more vivid in the life of any Christian than his recollection of his spiritual birth…Talk to almost anyone who has been baptized into Christ. They will remember the occasion; they will tell you how they felt; they will privately recollect their fervent intents in that moment of illumination.

The rest of us, as Hebrews instructs, must use our memory. We must think back on the truths that converted us; we must remember the good intentions that moved us. And all of us need to be busy collecting other memories to sustain us—memories of personal battles to escape the slavery of sin and of comradeship with others in doing good. The savoring of that past will be the key to your future.