What is your place of remembrance?
Is it a wall of remembrance…Of framed prayers soaked in your tears
With the Father’s love woven into their answers giving cause to remember a faithful God as you stand in hope for future framed prayers at your wall of remembrance.
Is it a book of remembrance…
Of pages written from life on your knees from those painful heartaches that only a God up at midnight could understand; a loving Father who exchanges your mourning for dancing in songs of encouragement throughout your book of remembrance.
Is it a heart of remembrance…
Recorded in the secret places hidden and known only to the one who knitted you in your mother’s womb, those endless petitions poured out onto the lap of a merciful God, who sees it all from beginning to glorious end, a triumph One who answers before a single word ever leaves the lips of those who have a heart of remembrance.
Is it an altar of remembrance…
An altar of stones gathered and piled to remember a God of deliverance, the one whom saved you from despair and destruction, an almighty deliverer who made a way when there seemed to be no way. Those altars left behind along the pathway for your children and grandchildren to discover and question you to remember, all the while leaving a road map of great hope and direction for future deliverance’s of their own while gathering around your altar of remembrance.
What is your place of remembrance?
What is that place you run towards to remember a faithful God?
What is that place you dare not forget a generous Father in the midst of your own prosperity, remembering the great warning God gave the Israelite’s before entering their inheritance of the Promised Land.
11 Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. 12 Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, 13 and when your herds and flows grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, 14 then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
(Deuteronomy 9:11-13 NIV)
Interestingly, as God entreats his children to remember,
He himself remembers.
God remembers his promises and covenant with Abraham for a thousand generations.
(Psalms 105:8-10 NIV)
God remembers that never again will he destroy and flood the earth, giving us rainbows after every rain to remember his promise.
(Genesis 9:11, 13 NIV)
God keeps his promises, God stays in covenant, God remembers.
Twenty-six years ago David and I entered into a covenant relationship of marriage when we promised to love each other for life, to love each other in the good as well as the desperate throes forever this side of eternity.
For twenty-six years of wedded bliss, from our first anniversary and every milestone anniversary thereafter, two people return to their heart of remembrance, recalling a loving Father who gave two broken people a second chance at love.
Hand in hand we have chosen to remember the gift of the other, to dare not forget when God didn’t forget us either, to open our book of remembrances and celebrate the valleys as well as the mountains and name our blessings “one by one” in our remembering.
Along the pathways of our life together, a husband and wife have intentionally built an altar of remembrance for every difficult season that God delivered us from, as part of the inheritance and legacy of hope and encouragement David and I desire to leave behind for our children and grandchildren and generations beyond our lives.
More than anything else, our wall of remembrance, those framed faces that God began with us, are pictures of a million words and thoughts unable to articulate our “love story” of twenty-six years because we dared not forget, we chose to remember God’s faithfulness through the valleys as well as the mountaintops, never entertaining the thought of “letting go” because we knew too much in the
remembering.
I will love him forever, because in the remembering, I dare not forget God loved me first.
