Isaiah 49 has a wonderful passage in which God asked the question, “can a mother forget her nursing child”? The answer is that it is possible but not likely. The payoff of that biblical section is that God will never forget us because we’re engraved in the palm of his hand. When talking to mothers you realize that most of their memories are bound up with their children. So many of their memories are wrapped in events in their children’s lives almost to the point where you would think they forgot that they had a life or their own.
I have come to believe that experts exist to deprive us of anything that will enlighten, or give us delight in our life.
Now our memories are under attack. Experts studying memory have said that your first childhood memory is probably fabricated. They have dictated that children cannot form memories until after the age of three.
I find this frustrating because one of my favorite childhood memories is waking up behind bars to the gentle swishing of water. I’m in a bright sunlight room and my mother is taking water from a bucket and washing down the walls. Years ago I asked my mother about this memory and she was stunned because she remembered it as well. She told me I was in a crib and probably under a year old and she had gone to the well and got in the water to wash the walls down because we were living through a heat wave. My parents were worried I would get over heated and evidently I experienced some kind of seizures as a baby. The idea was to get the walls wet and open a couple of windows and create some kind of natural air conditioning. I don’t know if it worked or not but the old-timers said that it did. I have many memories like that and have been told that I was awfully young to be able to remember and now the experts have tried to put an end to that completely.
We live in a world that wants to separate us from memory. It wants to separate children from the memory of parents trying to fulfill the obligation of bringing up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Memorization was always important in my family because we were taught at some point the only Bible we might have is the one that’s in our heads, and the songs we might want to sing on our deathbed would be the songs that we were taught and remembered.
One the great gifts of parents is helping children to memorize important things. Don’t take it for granted.
Engraved in the palms of God’s hands and held up by hands with nail marks, parents and children are moved along by God’s mercy and memory is part of that motion. Parents do all they can to care for children and hopefully give them good memories.
