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2007

9th July
Smells

2nd July
Smile

26th June
Waterlogged

11th June
Plans

6th June
Letters

21st May
Friends

May 9th
Stereotypes

May 1st
Broken

April 16th
Climbing hills

April 9th
The Three Trees

April 2nd
Small but deadly

March 28th
Toby the SuperDog

March 19th
Mountains

March 4th
Lone Daffodil

February 26th
Working hours

February 19th
Memory

February 12th
Piercings

February 5th
Patience

January 29th
Surprise

January 22nd
Wind

January 15th
Honesty

January 8th
My Car

January 3rd
Happy New Year

Memory
19^th February 2007

 What can you remember? Do you have a good, clear memory or are you a tad forgetful? I worry about not being able to remember what I was talking about before getting distracted (which happens quite a lot – the forgetting thing and the distracted thing!), I worry that I forget what I went upstairs for, and I worry that I can’t remember hardly any of the info I learnt for my degree. I recognise that we all loose aspects of our memory as we age, but I’m still in my 20’s – I’m not sure I’ve got that much left to loose if I plan to live to a ripe old age! 

Maybe I’ve not lost to these memories, they’re just misplaced. A friend who I hadn’t seen for years, came to stay a few weeks ago. The whole time he was here he was, “Do you remember this?” “Do you remember that?” and I was having to physically trawl through my brain to locate these memories. But there the memories were! Pretty much every time I replied with, “Oh yeah, I had forgotten that!” the memories all came flooding back (well trickling back at least!) If I’d had to take a test about what had happened at specific times and places I would have struggled to pass, but after a little prompting the whole story became crystal clear.  

My parents are visiting me at the moment which means, among other things, that my dad will check out my computer. I consider myself to be pretty good with the old PC – I’m no computer geek, but I know more than most. Even so, it’s the fatherly thing (at least in our clan) to make sure everything’s in tip-top shape with my hard drive. It turns out I’m running low on memory – story of my life! The lack of available memory is making the machine slow and ineffective – again, sounding familiar!! To aid my forgetful PC my dad has tweaked a few things here and there, and he’s also defraged it (something I forgot to do!). This basically means that the computer has a tidying session, compartmentalising all the stuff to fit in a neat, ordered way, thus freeing up some valuable memory.

 So how can I defrag my life in order to free up some of my precious memory and to speed me up a bit? When I look back at the stuff that makes up my past, in amongst all the happy, fun times there are memories of mistakes I’ve made, arguments I wish I’d never had, hurtful things I wish I’d never done, words and actions of which I’m not proud. Why should I be remembering these things above the important things of my life that I want to keep in mind? When we are forgiven the sins are forgotten. Jesus doesn’t just forgive us for what we do wrong, but he also forgets it – we are washed totally clean. In that awesome passage about what real love is (1 Corinthians: 13) it says that love doesn’t keep a record of wrongs (the opposite to how we often do forgiveness –  ‘I forgive you but every time I get cross with you, I’ll bring up this mistake you’ve made’). If Jesus is love then that also makes him forgetful in the past wrongs department.  

So maybe what I need is a defraging of my life – if I’m sorry for my mistakes and have given them to Jesus then he’s forgotten them, so why am I still hanging on to them and remembering them? What I need is to let Jesus totally get rid of them to free up my mind and my heart for more positive, loving memories and actions. I don’t need to keep hold of them when they no longer belong to me – and why would I want to when it’s preventing me from remembering important stuff like the movement of water through soil particles (it was what I apparently learnt at Uni – among other things!) or the fact that I came upstairs for a wee!

This lent maybe you too could take the time to defrag your life with Jesus – you never know what forgotten things you might remember!