Old Memories

I like the feeling that you get when you are alone sitting by yourself and you remember something that you had forgotten about. I’m not talking about anything like forgetting to put the toilet seat down or realizing that your fly is unzipped. I mean memories. The things that you once did that brought joy to your heart. I like to think of it memories like millions of little bubbles that swirl around me as they are being blown from a wand. Every once in a while one of those bubbles lands on your hand and you remember. I think it’s a special moment when, for whatever reason, you just remember. The other day I remembered a driving over to Wheaton to see my friend Jody who was an RA. She invited me into her dorm to see her room. I remembered being nervous because I knew at a Christian school the dorms were not co-ed. I didn’t want to come up and see a girl in a towel or something like that you would see in a cheesy movie from the 80’s. Jody informed me that girls don’t do that. I didn’t know. Nakedness in guys dorms is pretty standard really, or at least in all the dorms I had ever been to. Anyway, she brought me up and I remember feeling like I was important because I had the ratio in my favor. She let me stay in her room until she got done doing some RA-type stuff and then we went down town. We ate lunch at this little breakfast whole in the wall place. I remember being able to hear the train. We ate our lunch and reminisced probably about high school, grace, things in our past lives.

See, that was a great memory to me. It wasn’t particularly interesting or exciting, but it was comforting. Like a warm glass of coco on a hot day. It brought me back so to speak. It reminded me of days gone by. Friendships and places that were once strong connections in my like that are now no longer as strong. But for that moment, in that memory, I’m there again. Those things are real again. I can get lost in them. Because I think we do get lost when we remember. Have you ever had a memory so strong that you almost think it is real? I have. And maybe ‘real’ isn’t the right word. Memories that are so present that you forget that they are in the past? No, I don’t think that is right either. Hmmm….memories that they bring the past feeling and experiences into the present. I think that is more of what happens.

I think it’s a gift to remember things like that. Sometimes when I have little moments like that I feel special because it’s like God reached out his hand and gave it to me. Like little blessings from above. It makes me appreciate the Omniscience of God. I don’t think he has any memories. Well maybe he has memories, I don’t want to be theological about it, but I know for sure He doesn’t forget. Forgetting in the sense of then having to remember. Anything that is forgotten with God is gone I think. I think He’s outside of time and able to see the scope of it all. I don’t think he needs to remember because he knows all.

While it is a gift to remember, remembering makes me sad in some ways. I can’t help but wonder where all the memories go that are unremembered. If I don’t remember something, if no one remembers it, did it really happen? It probably did still happen I guess, but what value do things unremembered earn? I can’t think of the things I can’t remember but I’d be a fool to think that I remember everything. Are not those things that I can’t remember also important? How important are they if I cannot remember them? Maybe the memories are not important but those things that the memories are about were important. So I guess unremembered memories do mean something.