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It always amazed me when, in her 90s, my grandmother recalled her childhood. She would remember details that seemed impossible to bring to mind.
Sometime I, too, think back and am astonished at the things I can remember about events that happened decades ago. I can remember the embarrassment I felt as a five-year-old at being told to sit on the step at the front of the classroom for talking (and that was more than six decades ago!). Remembering is a wonderful gift.
Sometimes, though, having a good memory can hurt us. We remember things we have suffered or hurts others have inflicted on us. We remember debts people owe and we can have trouble forgiving.
The need to sometimes forget
I recently read a statement from author C.S. Lewis that struck me. He said that when he considers Jesus' instruction to forgive 70 times seven times in Matthew 18:22, he considers it differently than most.
For him one painful experience that he was striving to forgive kept resurfacing because various things, places or little events would remind him of the incident. He likened it to tearing a scab off an old wound. He had to continue to forgive the same deed over and over, each time it resurfaced. Memory can do that to us.
In Matthew 6:3 Jesus tells us not to let our left hand know what our right hand is doing. Physically this is impossible, but Jesus used this to encourage us to do good deeds secretly or privately. His point was that we are to learn to give and then forget that we have given. The only problem is that we cannot deliberately wipe things out of our memory.
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