I have recently been re-visiting my poetry and song files on my laptop and have gradually been printing them out and collating them into a book I can pass on one day 😊. It’s cover is today’s art.  I would like my children to remember not only me, but also the words that came to me in moments of sadness, delight, or worship, moments of discouragement or victory.

This has been prompted by the discovery of an old notebook of my late dad’s containing sermon notes and some of the illustrations he used in preaching those sermons. As I traced that familiar old handwriting, I was visited by some very strong emotions that put me back on a seat in the old Tabernacle in Braamfontein, listening to his passionate call to worship or to repentance.

Memories are amazing and without them our lives have no meaningful context. That’s why it is so sad when someone we love loses their memory and we watch them slowly but surely disappearing from themselves and from us. We are helpless in the face of this loss because so much of relationship is the intimate fellowship of shared experience.

I am moved by the pathos of our Lord Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. Luke 22v19 says: He took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

It doesn’t seem possible that these men who had walked and talked with Him, 24/7 for three years, who breathed the same air and ate the same food, would need something to encourage them not to forget him, but Jesus spoke of the time, soon to come, when they would only rise above their suffering by remembering HIS. Then they only needed to pick up that piece of bread, look at each other, and they would be at that table once again. And they would remember that he also said: ‘Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows, but take heart, because I have overcome the world.’  

‘When I look back over the years, days of sunshine, sometimes of tears, I see you’ve led me Lord, step by step dear Lord!’ This line from a song I wrote many years ago testifies to the Holy Spirit’s amazing faithfulness in my life. Unfortunately, remembering and forgetting seem to have been a persistent cycle with me, but these days (with the wisdom of age?) I daily make a conscious effort to remind myself of what I seem to forget so easily – that he loves me, that he knows me by name, and that he will never leave me nor forsake me!

And in these lyrics from the late Dottie Rambo: “Roll back the curtain of memory now and then, show me where you’ve brought me from and where I might have been. Remember I’m human, and humans forget, so remind me, remind me dear Lord!”

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