Friday, September 15, 2017

Mnemonic Devices

There is nothing more frustrating than walking from one room to another and forgetting why you went there in the first place. We can blame it on age, kids, distractions, stress, anxiety, or any other common scapegoat, but the reality is we forget things. Easily.

It's even worse when it comes to the things of God.

We're late for an appointment and ready to pull out our hair but we forget how the last time we supernaturally had every green light possible and arrived five minutes early.

We get a call that our child is sick and needs to come home but forget that because we were home all day instead of running errands we had a long overdue phone call with a friend across the country.

We get held back at work because someone called off but forget about the time that the same situation kept us from the accident we were sure to have been caught up in.

I think the reason God tells us in his word so many times to remember is because he knows just how prone we are to forget.

A friend treats us poorly and we forget that we're a loved and accepted child of God.

Our kids blatantly disregard our instructions but we forget that God will hear our prayers and cries for help.

We memorize verses, read our Bibles, and go to small groups and forget the lessons we learned in less than an hour.

I realize that most of us are not going to start adding tassels to our clothes. And if we added as many as we would need to our handbags our shoulders and backs would start to ache. And since not all of us can run out and get a tattoo with the word remember, we must find something that can help keep us in check. Probably from having 'teacher brain' I'm going with mnemonic devices.

I can choose to:

Rearrange
Every
Memory (and)
Every
Moment
Before
Everlasting
Redemption

Or I can choose to:

Fail
Obviously (to)
Remember
God
Every
Time

Granted we won't do this perfectly, but if we become more aware of the times we are clearly forgetting, we can immediately switch back to remembering and that's what really matters.


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