christian living on Memory

In the film  Memento , we meet Leonard, who is searching for the man who killed his wife. He appears to be the typical Hollywood hero of the early 2000s. The hair is right; the jaw line, the atmospher...

Barbara Brown Taylor recounts her first experience with caving, the exploration of caves that are not prepared or made easily accessible for inexperienced explorers. Her guides gave her a bit of helpf...

The Necessity of Memory Memory—or, more actively,  remembering , plays an all-important role in our lives. Our culture likes us to focus on  the now, "looking forward rather than looking back&q...

Gracious God, you shower us with so many blessings, yet we struggle to share them with others. You love a cheerful giver, but we sometimes give grudgingly. We forget that all we have is yours, and tha...

Holy God, we forget you are near. We forget that you are everywhere. We are so wrapped up in our own worlds that we cannot see beyond ourselves. God, you are so much greater! Lift up our heads. Lift u...

Lord, our hearts are not large enough, our memory is not good enough, our wills are not strong enough: Take our hearts and enlarge them, Take our memories and give them quicker recall, Take our wi...

Pastor: Oh Lord our God, we have forgotten who you are and what you have done for us. Your great and miraculous works for us are lost in the recesses of our minds, and we could not care less about you...

Steadfast, ever faithful God, you are always with us. Day in and day out, you provide for us, you show us your grace, you inspire awe within us as we experience your goodness. But almighty God, our me...

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham describes the importance of looking on the past with grace: Developing a redemptive memory requires recalling not only the pain of the pas...

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler was famous for beginning counseling sessions with new clients by asking, “What is your earliest memory?” No matter how his patient replied, Adler responded, “And...

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

As you get older, three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

We don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

On a trip to France during college, I (Cyd) was walking through a historic garden in Paris with my older sister. Rounding one of the reflecting pools, we both caught a familiar scent and stopped dead ...

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

A police officer pulled over a distinguished-looking woman, the story goes, and asked why she had exceeded the speed limit. The old gentleman sitting in the passenger seat laughed and said, “Well, you...

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

How vast a memory has love!

Memory is one of the highest powers in our nature. By it day is linked to day, the unity of life through all our years is kept up, and we know that we are still ourselves. In the spiritual life, recol...

Memory is more indelible than ink.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Memory is the fabric of our souls. It enables us to integrate and make sense of the experiences of our bodies, minds, and spirits. It makes us who we are and allows us to keep our loved ones close, ev...

“I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I don’t really remember yesterday all that well.”

The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself And cease to recollect The Auger and the Carpenter— Just such a retrospect...

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between the past, present, and future ultimately meaningless: to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that s...

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.