making sense of "remembering"

This is Memorial Day weekend and a time to reflect on those who have gone before us and sacrificed so that we have the freedom to live as we do today. This is certainly a respectful activity and a good use of this weekend. However, "remembering" is an ageless practice that was of considerable more societal value years before mass communication and even the printing press itself.


Remembering was the way generations passed down the values and norms of their time. Remembering is about making the effort to bring to our consciousness things that are not active in our minds. For generations throughout history, story telling (the art of sharing memories with others) was as admired as Facebook, if one can imagine that :-)

What does remembering accomplish? Does it necessarily do anything for those we remember? Not really, most have passed on to Glory or somewhere else. Then what value is there in days we set aside to memorialized others?

Remembering anchors our being in where we have come from, how we got here outside of our own efforts, what those were like who formed us and our world! Making sense of not only our past but the people and events that shaped the world we came from broadens our perspective of ourself. We are not a creature of our own creation. We are peeps in the flow of something much greater than us.

Remembering should feed our humility, especially since there's not much else we do that does :-)
Its our nature to assume we create our life and perform in a way that accomplishes what we have. We over value the personal influence we can have on cause and effect.

Remembering ushers in a more significant sense of identity and personal worth. When we can understand our self in light of those who loved us and even those who didn't even know us but acted in heroic ways to affect our life, then we can truly see both how small we are and how important we are all at the same time. We can receive the blessings that have been made ours at no expense or effort or deserving on our part.

Remembering is God's gift to us that makes His Grace real in our lives!!

Now that is worth pondering this weekend (and other days too) ......