My youngest son has an amazing memory for detail. If you
play him a song he’s familiar with, he can tell you when he first heard
it — year, month and sometimes day — where we were and what we were
doing at the time, and probably what video game was released that week.
I, on the other hand, can go back into the ComingUntrue archives, read a two-year-old
post, and wonder “Who wrote that?”
It was usually me.
I don’t know about you, but my memory is like a buffer that
contains only the most urgent matters of necessity and back-files almost
everything else. When it comes to retaining scripture, I find this
tremendously disappointing, because it means I am always having to relearn
what I previously discovered and even wrote down in great detail. Two,
three or four years later, it seems all new to me.
Is it memory loss? I don’t think so. Give me even a small
mental connection to hang other facts on, and it will begin to come back; not
perfectly of course, but I usually know a great deal more about a “lost”
subject or situation than I may initially imagine. It’s more like I have
an inability to access certain memories on demand. They are still there, but
down in the mind’s basement, or maybe out in the garage under a tarp and stacks
of old newspapers where you really have to do some work to bring them back into
the light of day.
I would be more concerned if it wasn’t obvious to me that
most people I know are going through the same thing, and even more so as
we age. One day my son’s memory will not work so well either. We must enjoy
these things while we can.
But why is that? Why do things we wish we could retain slip
away so easily? Why has God made us in such a way that forgetfulness is part of
the package? The obvious explanation is that it is a consequence of sin.
Perhaps that is the case. But surely even perfected human beings must
prioritize what they think about, giving some matters a higher percentage of their
attention, and shunting inconsequential or unpleasant things into a less
prominent position, where they rightly belong. It is difficult to imagine a
mind so mechanically precise that it would hold every fact equally in its
forefront at every moment. I’m not sure such an experience would even be
desirable. God does not do it. Certain matters, once judicially dealt with, he takes
off the table and very deliberately puts
out of mind forever.
Yes, there are good things about forgetting. King Lemuel’s
mother reminded him that it is good for the afflicted and for those in bitter
distress to have even the temporary relief
from misery that comes from forgetting.
Then there was Joseph, who named his firstborn son Manasseh,
which means “forgotten”. He said, “God has made me forget
all my hardship and all my father’s house.” This was a positive thing. He was
commemorating his forgetfulness. For Joseph, the honors, pleasures and
responsibilities of the present day had eclipsed the past and pushed it back
out of sight. He attributed the change to God, and he was grateful for it.
Joseph serves as a reminder that whatever our current
difficulties and sorrows may be, God can change them in the blink of an eye in
ways we cannot imagine. Today’s burdens, which sometimes seem too great to
carry, may be remembered tomorrow only in so far as we can thank our heavenly
Father that they are no longer part of our day-to-day experience.
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