Remember

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. Heb 10:23

I'm rearranging my quiet room for one reason. It is not quiet. Having been a bedroom for both my children at different times, a craft room, a guest room and partial storage room, there are memories everywhere I look. And the disheveled person I struggle with inside is fighting the memories and wondering what to do with them.

I want to hold the good as well as the bad cause that's called life. So some go in the attic, and I need bookshelves and hooks and trash bags to sort out the rest. And yes, what a time for the word remember. Why does hope disappear so fast with some of my memories?

Have you ever been caught in a wind tunnel? Have you ever been hit and thrown to the ground by a moving trolley? Have you ever been a hundred feet above tree level and and had to cross over a very narrow strip of ice, and if you slipped, that would be the end? Have you ever been over your head in water and felt yourself drowning? I have experienced all of these. Sometimes remembering the past paralyzes me. They can make good stories where everyone gets a laugh, me included, but initially they were no laughing matter.

When remembering anything you are reconnecting a present thought to a former thought, and when you do you associate yourself with it all again. So what do I do with these memories? Some are surely to be cherished and kept, but, funny thing, the harder, hurtful ones I seem to have very mixed feelings about. Erasing them would leave wide, empty spaces. It was in these hard, hurtful places I was clinging to hope and faith that I couldn't see. I could only believe in the face of unbelief.

 Christ  gives purpose to the pain. Without hope, all we see is the ugliness.

Hope carries me from my past memories through my present experiences and towards my future. I have to let it take me beyond all my own personal evaluations of my situations and bring me into the realm of being transformed into who Christ has made me to be.

I don' t want to re-member myself to something  that God has re-deemed me from. 

I was deemed unworthy, held there by a conviction and a sentence of death. But now Christ has spoken and the pardon been executed on my behalf. I am detached from all that associates me from sin. It cannot identify me ever again.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Rom 5:1,2

Somehow in the middle of the bad, the good, the wrong, the right, the messes and the order, there He is in all of it. Christianity is not about never having pain and tragedy and loss. It is about having Christ with you when it all happens. The messes mean there was life going on and maybe that's why things didn't get put away or dishes didn't get washed till morning, or mid-morning. The misunderstandings and arguments meant people were thinkers and not just like me. And didn't I want them to be?

Let's remember what God remembers.

He remembers that we are dust (PSA 103:14)
He remembers His covenant (1 Chron 16:15)
He remembers the price He paid (1 Cor 6:20)
He remembers His promises (2 Pet 1:4)
He remembers that He will come again to gather us to Himself (Jn 14:3)

He remembers, He connects with His people.

As I begin this season of Lent and prepare to celebrate Christ's resurrection, I want to re-member myself with His sufferings, His pain and the joy that was before Him, the hope that was man's redemption from a fallen world. When I do that, maybe I will find the quietness I long for.