Sunday September 4, 2016
I love to scrapbook. Although as our family gets bigger and technology gets easier, maybe it’s not called scrapbooking anymore. Whatever it is, I love to spend the summer sorting through our pictures. Smilebox is my go-to photo app. I delete the fuzzy pictures and arrange and label the memorable ones. Each kid has a collection of albums. I also keep a family album for each year and a marriage album of each anniversary.
I had been avoiding Theo’s chemo pictures for a while. I hate to see him without hair. I finally sat down last week and went through every. single. picture. I cried the entire afternoon, but I sorted through 20 months of pictures.
The book of Joshua is an exciting account of incredible adventure and miracles. Chapter 1 starts out with clear instructions from the Lord, instructions that speak to us today as much as they spoke to Joshua back then. Chapters 2 and 3 would make a great movie (in my opinion). And in Chapter 4, God instructs the people to stop and build a memorial to remember what He accomplished through them.
In the daily grunt of life, it’s so easy to pray, to receive God’s provision and then move on and forget. We are quick to adopt the next worry or need. We bask in our neediness instead of basking in His goodness and faithfulness. We give proportionately less time and attention to the answered prayer and an excess of time and attention on the next unknown. I stand guilty of this all the time. I can tell you 10 things that weigh on my heart as we begin a new week, but my memory is fuzzy when it comes to God’s grace and mercy from just yesterday.
I hope our scrapbooks are a blessing to our kids. They love to look through them now and I imagine them sharing our memories with their spouses and kids in the years to come. More importantly, my scrapbook time has become a discipline of remembering. It often turns into a time of worship. When I stop and look at all that God has delivered us from, the big things and the little things, all I can do is bless His name.
Happy Remembering
Joshua 4
21 He said to the Israelites, “In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ 22 tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ 23 For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea[b] when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. 24 He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God.”
Psalm 77
11I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
12 I will consider all your works
and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”
