Happy Remembruary!

As we celebrated “Thank-You-Ary”,  I came across Psalm 9:1, and  I felt like God said, “February will be a month for remembering.” So just like we renamed January to Thank-You-Ary, we have renamed February to Remembruary. So here I am knee deep in memories.

25 Years of the Mission Adventures Network

In 1997 we helped co-found the Mission Adventures Network. Ever since, we have been multiplying this short-term outreach ministry that we developed in Los Angeles. In honor of Remembruary, I have been posting daily the theme tee shirt designs from years past to my Instagram and Facebook accounts. It’s been fun — so many memories! So many themes! So many things that God spoke to us for us to share with our participants. So many wonderful people helped turn these ideas into physical objects. *Sigh*

Remembering Is Reinforcing Gratitude

It’s interesting to me that as I remember all these themes and all the people who participated, I can’t help but feel grateful. Remembering what God has done in these last 25 years increases my humility and thankfulness. 

Remembering Is Birthing Faith for the Future

And as I look back on all that God has done, I am feeling hope for my future. He is creating faith in me for the challenges ahead.

God Instructs Us to Remember 

So I’ve been thinking about memory and the act of remembering. And I’m seeing that around a hundred times in the Old Testament God instructs us to remember. Many of them say roughly, “Remember how I got you out of Egypt”. It’s an instruction to not simply rehearse the happenings of life, but to remember God’s actions. I think this is an important distinction for a couple of reasons. 

The Painful Memories Can Be Healed

Simply remembering what happened can be painful. We all have difficult memories, and I don’t want to go back and dwell on those things — I’d rather forget them. But sometimes, sleepless at 3:00 a.m., I can’t help but remember the dark moments. Ugh. In the light of day, they tend to fade, but those memories still back there, subconscious, unconscious, and they can have power over me. They fuel my ugly tendency to be self-critical, and underscore the false belief that I am not good enough. 

So I think this instruction is to look at our happenings with the perspective of what God did. Yes, I have had dark moments that created bad memories. But when I look at them in the context of who God is and how He walked with me through those times, it can change my thinking. Remembering it this way gets me to acknowledge that yes, the dark moments happened. Yes, I may have played some role in them. But also yes, God was present and active. He sent help in many forms, and has been changing me from the Inside Out (our 2014 theme title, ha!). Recognizing God’s action changes my response from a shameful, “I am not good enough”, to a more accurate, “God is good, and his love endures forever”. In this way, I move towards freedom and wholeness.

The Good Memories Are Not All ABOUT Me 

In a similar way, simply remembering the good things without rehearsing God’s action can be bad for me. I can look back on the good moments, my triumphs, my achievements and can I imagine it was all me. The truth is, even my best moments are because of who God is and because of who he has made me to be, and because of what He has done through me. Rehearsing his actions gives me the proper humble perspective, and surprisingly I’ve found that it doesn’t take any of the satisfaction away. I am still proud (in a good way) of my good work and my good moments. This sense of well-being is enhanced because I know I was participating with God for His glory. Rehearsing in this way reminds me that He is proud of me and welcomes my participation. I mean imagine if Moses was all, “Remember how kick-@$$ it was when I parted the Red Sea?”. Wouldn’t God say something like, “You parted the Red Sea? No, you raised your staff. I parted the Red Sea.” Remembering God’s action in our best moments keeps us in reality and keeps us humble.

I Theorize this Is about the “…renewing of our minds.…”

In Romans 12:1 Paul tells us to renew our minds and that this is an act of spiritual worship. I think remembering God’s action is a way to renew our minds. If we simply rehearse the happenings, we only reinforce our often-wrong conclusions. If we remember what the Lord has done, we can change our patterns of thinking.  

We tend to think of our brains as a big, wet, jiggly, grey, jell-o-like hard drive. We imagine that a memory is stored in some sort of bits and bytes and that when we recall a memory we are calling up that data from somewhere deep down in the back, and bringing it up front and viewing it on the monitor of our conscious mind. This may be a helpful metaphor, but it’s not all that true. Recalling memory is more like a rehearsal. We don’t just bring up an image, we bring up all sorts of associations, like the thing we smelled in that moment, or the feelings we had when that event happened. In a way, we re-experiencing our memories. And this re-experiencing is like a shortcut across the lawn of our memories that eventually becomes a worn path in our thinking. This is how wrong conclusions can shape our thoughts and behavior. 

So when we remember God’s action, we are shifting our perspective as we review and re-experience our memories. This can change our patterns of thinking and our conclusions. Where we have memories that reinforce our shame, our conclusion is often that we are not worthy of love. This is where God can re-wire us. As we remember what He did, He and we re-draw the paths in our minds. We can come to grips with the reality of what happened, and shift our conclusions from shame to healthy reality. We can learn, believe, and even feel that we are worthy of God’s love and action in our lives. I think this is the neuro-psycho-biology of renewal. Perhaps in our participation of remembering God’s action, we are uncovering God’s mechanism of transformation.

Take Time to Remember What God Has Done

Ok, so maybe that was a lot, haha! My hope is that since you’ve read this far, that you are prepared to make remembering God’s action a practice in your life. What do you need to remember from His perspective? Are some bad memories now percolating towards the surface of your thinking? Are you in danger of succumbing to old conclusions and old coping/numbing strategies? Perhaps Holy Spirit in you is at work. Perhaps this is God’s invitation to rehearse and re-experience some things. Perhaps this is on the way to your fullness and freedom. Don’t hesitate, participate with Him. And I would say a Christian counselor is a welcome way for you to move forward. 

Even if there aren’t past traumas coming to your mind right now, perhaps God is inviting you to review the good things. Maybe Holy Spirit is inviting you to remember your achievements in the light of His presence and activity. I don’t think God is looking to take us down a notch. I think our loving Heavenly Father is hoping to be in shared space with you.