Sights and Insights
Devotion for April 27, 2021
I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
I will consider all your works
and meditate on all your mighty deeds.
Ps 77:11-12 (NIV)
The past few days I have been sorting through a large plastic bin that my mother had passed to me at some point. I knew that is was vaguely “my stuff” but beyond that I did not have any idea what was in it. I was rather shocked to open it and find pretty much every art project and spelling test from preschool through second grade at the top of the bin. As I moved through, I found artifacts from every era of my childhood into young adult years, including the tickets to my senior prom in high school and handwritten notes from my political philosophy class from my freshman year of college.
My family moved from the house I grew up in one week after the end of my first year of college. I suspect that all of these items were tossed into this bin during that frantic week, and had remained unopened ever since. There were some gems worth keeping to be found in the mix, to be sure. There were also many things that should have been thrown out the day they came home. Yet even in these random activity sheets and early elementary school assignments that have now made their way into the trash, there was something important in the forgotten memories that they represent. There is no real lasting value or reason to keep a test of my first-grade attempts at phonetic spelling. Still, I had no recollection of being so influenced by the accent of my hometown that I would assume that “water” is spelled “werter.” Nonetheless, these seemingly minor threads are a part of who I have been, and so are a piece of who I am now. There is something to reconnecting with those moments.
Remembering who God is and what God has done is an important theme in scriptures. It is through remembering what God has done and what God’s nature is that we get a true sense of who we are. Even though some of God’s actions are from the distant past and do not seem to have any direct relevance on our lives today, they give us a picture of what God values and how God operates in the world. Remembering these little details helps us to understand our relationship with God and allows us to more effectively recognize God at work in the world around us right now. Psalm 77 urges us to remember the seemingly remote works of God as a way to give us hope and trust that God is with us even in challenging times. May we remember all that God has done, so that we can trust all the more and recognize in God who we were created to be.