Remember

How much we forget through our lives. It begs the question how different our lives would be if we had perfect memories. Would you remember your first steps? The times you needed to be carried to get anywhere? The first time you tasted sugar? The first time you were on a swing? The first time you got hit? The first friend you made? Your first day of school? The day you first met Jesus?

We forget so much. Some of it is worth forgetting, and some we need to remember. Like that first rush of realizing how inadequate we are in front of God. The complete and total brokenness we experience when we enter His presence. That longing and absolute need for Him in our lives. That time that we forget so quickly as the colour fades from our life.

But not all is lost. Even as we watch the memories glide almost peacefully away from us, we retain some faint residue of those experiences. If nothing more than a thin film of mildew on some remote part of our memories, everyone remembers in some form what those longings were like. And how quickly we are to try to scrub ourselves of it. If we remember it, we are bound to it.

I am. I did. I wish I could say I didn't. But too often I find myself scrubbing furiously, trying to remove any trace so that I can claim ignorance. But I'm not ignorant. I know full well what I have left in my path, and I long to be back there. In that naive chasing after a full God. I want to be a child again. I want to, without abandon chase after a Father who loves me, cares for me, and who I have no reason to doubt. Someone who I feel like I can talk to one on one, without my own sin or my own doubts getting in the way.

I want to stop scrubbing the soap, and start scrubbing the dirt.

My life is inversed. I have forgotten. I want to remember what it means to run playfully through the fields of light once more. I want to leave this dark, damp, musty cellar and burst through the doors into the radiant sunshine once more. But I'm afraid of what I'll look like, what I'll be.

And then I remember. I was never enough. I don't deserve this wonderful gift. But it is offered freely to me. Someone has already taken all of this dirt, and cleansed me from it. Though I have done nothing to deserve it, I am clean. And I come once more, crawling on me knees, towards an almighty God who can strike me down at any moment, black like death, but white like the sun.

In that moment, I look down, expecting to see a pale, frail, naked body covered in soot, only to discover a healthy, clean, robed in white body. I am clean. And in that moment, that fraction of a second, I am clean.

I remember.