Having left my home state of 29 years recently to go away to grad school, I find myself in a strange place and looking back to the past quite often. Certain memories make me smile or even laugh, either because they were good, funny, or completely ridiculous. And like all people, there are other events I would prefer to forget (unfortunately my brain usually chooses not to cooperate on that front). Ironically enough, the thing that good memories and bad ones have in common is that they are both tinged with sadness, the bad ones because they are…well…bad, and the good ones because they are now only reachable in the mind. With all of this, I began to wonder the other day what the ultimate value of memories as a phenomenon really is. After all, with each day we get further and further away from the events that given memories point to. Intuitively I know they matter, but why? The following is what I came up with.
You can’t really talk about memories without thinking about time. Time and memory are inextricably related. Time passes with the events that it carries and memories and circumstantial evidence is what is left. There is no way to stop it or to pause it; time keeps going on. Sometimes I have a really hard time with that idea. After all, there are moments and seasons I wish I could get back to and such a feeling gets elicited by remembering moments long gone. This most recently hit me when I went home for Christmas this past December. One morning I met up with a friend and her two little kids and went to a McDonald’s for their pancake breakfasts (Breakfast snobs, please hold your disgust at bay. The ultimate point here is not about fine cuisine.) While eating and watching the kids eat, I had one of those TV-movie-of-the-week style flashbacks to a memory of my grandfather taking my older brother and I to McDonald’s for breakfast. I don’t remember exactly when or what the circumstances were, but we were little and quite excited about pancakes and sausage (as kids we rarely went to McDonald’s for breakfast). Fast forward to December 2006 and I am 32 years old and having McDonald’s breakfast with two excited little kids. At that moment I wanted to go back in time so badly and have breakfast with my grandfather again. What am I to do with that memory and the sweetness and pain that it evokes.
While I can’t claim to know what all of God’s intentions are for the notion of memories, I think some of them became clear to me. While they are not always fun or pleasant, memories serve an important and powerful function in our lives. They orient us within the story of our lives in a way that helps us understand who we are and why we are who we are. Each of our stories is interwoven in such a way that our past touches both the present and the future. For instance, my maternal great-grandparents and their life stories have shaped my life, helped me understand who our family is, and yet I never met them. They died before I was born. Nevertheless, I was raised by and heard my great-grandparents stories from the children and grandchildren that they had. Their story is connected to mine and, in a way, lives on. For those of us who are Christians, we learn through remembering what God did through Israel and Christ that we are all a part of a larger story. It is “THE” story that has priority and precedence over all other stories.
This mentioning of the God of Israel’s story relates to one of the other values that memories hold when properly recognized: memories act as witness. They witness not only to others when we recount them, but they witness to us as well. This brings me back to my McDonald’s story of when I was little and having breakfast with my grandfather. The actual event of my grandpa taking us to breakfast and all of the happiness and excitement wrapped up in that moment was a glimpse and a manifestation of the Kingdom of God. That single moment back in the early 1980s said that God was real, alive, and active on the earth; it was Christ at breakfast. As I remember that breakfast it acts as a witness to me that while I wait for the Kingdom of God to be completed at Christ’s return, the presence of his authority and his Kingdom is already here. While I absolutely need the witness of the Bible to God’s plan and glory—Scripture is that witness that provides the lens through which to see and understand all other witnesses—I also need my childhood memories, both good and bad. They show me that God is good, that God takes care of all of us, that God loves us, and that God shows up at McDonald’s breakfasts’.
God’s goodness and providence in our pasts gives us reason to hope in his future goodness. Sometimes I am not sure where I am at—both figuratively and literally in this new town I am in—or where I am heading. I am definitely not always at peace with life and its many uncertainties. But in my memories I try to remember that I am in Christ, that my grandfather is in Christ, and that though, “we all must endure our going whence,” we shall all rise again in Christ sometime. I know that is true, in part, because of a breakfast at McDonald’s I had with my grandfather a long time ago.
