Thursday 10th December

Memory.

Yesterday I was pondering the whole subject of memory  - and wondering what it is and why it is so important.  Here are some of my very undeveloped and random thoughts.

I went to see Gladys.  She is 91 and increasingly confused.  Last weekend she went to visit her sister who was celebrating her ninetieth birthday so I asked her about the party - who was there and had she enjoyed it.  She immediately started telling me about a previous visit and ran two stories together as one, repeating herself every second sentence.   Blissfully unaware that she had told me two minutes previously what she was happily telling me again.  If I hadnt been aware of who was who and what happened when I would have been able to make no sense of it whatsoever.   But because I have spent the past five years listening to her stories I can follow the threads even when they are all chopped up and muddled together.   But oddly she was able to tell me that when she was ten she went to Scottish country dancing classes on a Wednesday evening and told me the name of the street and the house name where the classes were held!!

When I left Gladys today I was thinking that it would be very handy not to have a memory at all.  Then we would never suffer from the loss of it. And we would be spared alot of the pain which memory causes us.   But the more I thought about that the more I realised that a memory is actually totally fundamental to us being human.   If we had no capacity to remember we could not learn.  We would not be able to relate to each other.  We would repeat ourselves over and over again - we would be machines.

Along with the ability to remember comes the ability to forget.  God clearly has the ability to remember and forget  Isaiah 43:25   Heb 10:17 ( which is a bit odd if you think about it because He is eternal , therefore outside time - so why would He need to be able to remember or forget?  Everything is eternally now to God.  Hmmmm.   Will have to ponder that some more!)  Perhaps the point is that God SHOULDNT be able to forget, because He is eternal.  And yet He CHOOSES to forget our sins and failings as an act of His will.   Because His love and mercy are awesome.

I have a terrible memory and always have had.   I am increasingly concerned that at not-yet fifty I cant remember anything about anything.  And Im not exaggerating.  I can only remember the sketchiest details about two out of three of my kids being born and nothing at all about number three.  If anyone asks me to give the address of the last five places Ive lived - no chance.  Id have to look them up on Google maps.   And there's a thing..... maybe in the future our need for memory will diminish as we are increasingly able to record everything about our lives in digital space.   We no longer need to remember phone numbers because they are lodged in our phones.  In the not too distant future perhaps we will not need to remember anything much at all.  Because it will all be remembered for us on the internet.

As we lose our capacity to commit things to memory it is important that we do not consign the Word of God to the ' cloud' or to our phones and gadgets.   The Psalmist says ' I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against You'  ( Ps 119:11)   The point being that the Word of God needs to be so much a part of us that it can be pulled out like a dagger in times of danger or stress and wielded as a weapon against the enemy.   It might feel old fashioned to recite memory verses and learn scripture by heart - but the Word of God is our armour and our strong tower.  We need not only to have it available to us on our ipads, but have it embedded in our minds where it will wash our thinking clean and keep us in the paths of righteousness