Remembering who you are and whose you are
Blog post by Matt McCoy
2 minute read
Listen to this blog as an audio recording
This coming Sunday is a service of re-membering. We’ll get to pause together and remember Hannah and Abigail, the journey that we’ve been on together, and the ways we’ve seen God show up in our midst.
We tend to think of memory as an individual thing: I remembered my keys, I remembered your birthday, I remembered to take out the trash. All throughout the bible, memory is displayed as a community thing, too: Abigail reminded David to let God take care of his enemies. In the book of Joshua, the people build a pile of stones and call it their ‘helping stones’ to help them remember who God is and who they are. The Hebrew word for ‘helping stones’ is ‘Ebenezer.’
I find a great comfort in community memory. This morning I talked with my grandmother, who is in her last season of life. She no longer remembers that she and my grandfather built her house, and that I was just there two weeks ago. Even as she loses her memory, her family and her community hold her memories for her, and her memory is safe with us.
This Sunday will be an exercise in community memory. We’ll have a chance to remember where we’ve seen God in our midst, and rather than make a pile of helping stones, we will respond through creating art together. I would imagine that when you read the words “respond through creating art together” you might feel a certain amount of anxiety around that, because you (like me) might not be much of an artist. The goal of the drawing exercise we’ll do together isn’t to demonstrate our artistic acumen, it’s to remember where God shows up. We’ll take what we create, put it up on the wall, and then take a ‘gallery walk’ to interact with what everyone else remembered. And in so doing, we’ll cultivate our community memory.
If you get a chance before Sunday night, I’d encourage you to go on our website and watch the videos from our series on Hannah and Abigail.
If you only get the chance to watch one, I’d watch the introductory video that Jessie, Bruce and I put together.
If you get a chance before Sunday night, I’d encourage you to go on our website and reread the blogs from our series on Hannah and Abigail. If you only get the chance to read one, I’d read the introductory one titled “What are life’s challenges that get you fired up?”
I find that, when I get to the end of a book, rereading the introduction helps me remember all the parts in the middle. The same is true for this series.
Remember who you are and whose you are!