“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”
Marie Antoinette (attributed)
This spring when my hometown was still digging itself out from under a blanket of snow, I visited some friends in Europe. Germany was already bursting out with nature’s first gold—that nearly neon green of new life budding on every branch—; a place where the weight of history is felt and seen everywhere. Castles built in the twelfth century loom over the switchbacking turns in the Rhine. Cities with cobbled streets and historic architecture retrofitted to the needs of the present bustle with the lives of its people. The new and the old; the present and the past mingled together everywhere. It’s impossible to wander through a park without encountering a moss covered monument to what has gone before. Some good events, some certainly bad—many of which I didn’t recognize or understand.
“When your children ask their fathers in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you had passed over, so that all the people of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.’” (Joshua 4:21b-24)
Perhaps one of the most powerful and perplexing abilities of the human mind is our penchant to forget. In purely material terms, we process inordinate amounts of information constantly. Paying attention, for example, to the height of a step just long enough to walk without tripping, yet forgetting almost immediately the small sign of warning about the existence of a step once our need for that information has passed. If we had fallen down and bruised a knee or twisted an ankle; we would certainly remember. We remember pain in order to avoid more of it in the future. And yet, we forget the information that prevented a potential injury in the first place. We deliberately forget; moving on to our next moment; often only remembering what has hurt us, and not what has saved us. We are contradictory creatures, ruminating on that of which we ought to let go, and abandoning what we ought not to forget. And, knowing our failing, we erect memorials for the future in order to remember the past.
Yet time weathers stone and monuments get hidden in lichen as new generations of life erode the words that would remind us what the stones mean. Always of twin purposes—a warning and a reminder. Don’t forget what you knew at this moment. Don’t forget God’s miraculous provision. Don’t forget what He spoke. Don’t forget what was revealed here. Take it with you. Witness it for a generation yet to come.
Even without monuments of stone, we each have our little ways of remembering. We write lists. We set reminders. We keep mementos as witnesses. Souvenirs—to remember. We write down events and thoughts and prayers in journals; or at least, I do. Filling notebooks with the good and the bad, the warnings and the signs, the desperate needs and the miraculous provisions. I’ll write it all down and then abandon it in a box in a closet; forgetting what I need to remember as I move on to the next moment. What good is a memorial if I forget what it showed me? What good is any of it, if I don’t take it with me?
It is a choice for forgetfulness to dismiss the miraculous signs and denigrate God’s wonders as close calls and lucky coincidences. Why should only our bruises be honoured with remembrance while the acts of God are treated as so commonplace so as to be unworthy of recall? Questions worth asking, whether I can bear the answers or not. What have I etched in the stone of my remembrance? What do I speak when I’m not trying to be good? What do I write when I’m writing for me? Do I record God’s voice speaking to me; His miraculous provision or even our inside jokes? Or, is it only my complaining sighs as I count up my scars?
“How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have done among them?” (Numbers 14:11)
Undoubtedly, the most powerful monument is the story that I repeat to myself. The perspective from my past that informs what I believe for the future—especially about God and others and myself. And so, I’ve gone back; examined old notebooks and journals;—not so much for my own words, but rather looking for His. Tilting the pages this way and that for the holographic appearance of Jesus to be revealed in the midst of circumstances that were clouded with pain. He’s there. I just have to remember.
This article was originally published in the May/June 2023 issue of live magazine. Check them out at baptistwomen.com
