Think about this. Wrap your minds around it. This is serious business, rebels. Take it to heart. Remember your history, your long and rich history. I am God, the only God you’ve had or ever will have — incomparable, irreplaceable…
ISAIAH 46:8-9 (MSG)
Try this brief thought experiment: Think about your earliest memory. What’s that thing you remember that precedes any other memory? Where does your own history begin its first-person narrative? Give yourself 10 seconds. Go.
You gave up after 2 seconds, didn’t you? Pretty tough to do, right? Even with more time, you’d probably not do all that much better. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to do this kind of thing. Unless there was something either epiphanal or catastrophic about your first memory, the odds that you remember it outright are likely to be pretty low. Memory apparently requires some kind of stimulus to access it. We need cues. We need a kind of spark to untether the bits of our storied past held within our minds.
Try it this way: What is the fondest memory you have of your grandfather? Describe the first wedding you ever attended. Whenever you needed to escape, where did you go? What was your first trip on a rollercoaster like? In a time of crisis, who was the first person you would turn to as a child? These questions are complicated, but they’re answerable. Most memories need prompts. In many cases, they need the help of other people to get the mental ball rolling.
If I started to tell you about my grandfather, for example, your own image of your grandfather would almost instantly materialize from out of the cloudiness of your own memory: I can recall how he whistled in nearly every story he told. He used a little toothy s-sounding high pitched tone in much the same way a written word might be underlined or bolded. So if something was amazing or unique, he’d say, “How ‘bout that!?” followed by his trademark downward sliding tooth-whistle tone. He always called me “chief.” He talked about tackling any of life’s challenges using the same expression he’d use to describe the joy of eating something delicious: “That’ll put hair on your teeth!” (This was his variation on the idea of hair sprouting on my young chest. I guess he liked whales with their “hairy” baleen filter-laden mouths and felt hairy teeth to be an apt marker of manhood). Now, think about your grandfather. Positive or negative, he is already taking shape in your mind.
This is why some stories need to be shared publicly. We talk about our histories because, as one writer put it, “in our most individual, we are our most universal.” God is constantly inviting his people to recall their history. He tells them, time and time again, to not let slip from their collective memories, the story of His rescue. He tells them that there is a reason to be thankful. Circumstances might overwhelm us. People are bound to let us down. We’re bound to let them down, too. We get sick. We get better. We get sick again. In the end, we discover the one “incomparable, irreplaceable” is God himself.
Tonight, Wednesday night (11/26) at 6:30p, at our Thanksgiving [Eve] service, we’ll share about our gratitude for the work of God in our lives. People will speak into a microphone and in 30 seconds, they’ll give voice to a piece of their history — our history. Even the most hardened of us will hear the stories of other people and their reasons for finding thankfulness. In their story we’ll remember “the only God [we’ve] ever had.” We’ll find hope in their words. Eventually, their gratitude can become ours, and our gratitude can become theirs. Come and celebrate together.
See you tonight,
Jeff
