How Remembering Cultivates Defiant Gratitude

an excerpt from my old blog & other small ways to remember

I don’t remember much from when our daughter was eighteen months old.

Sure, that’s rather specific. She’s reached the age that its natural for parts of her childhood to be recalled thanks to the photo stream, but it is a stage that I loved with our twins so the loss of it with our oldest has always given me a twinge of something that’s hard to name. This portion of her sweet life is mostly characterized by the sudden death of my sister and the broken months that followed, preserved mostly in my mind as a movie reel shifting between blurry fast forward scenes to a few sharp, full-color moments that will stay with me forever.

Photo by Dung Anh on Unsplash

On Ella’s most recent birthday, a milestone ten years, I read through my old blog (that shall remain nameless) where I’d done a very first-child thing and documented every month of her life. After that eighteen month mark, the gaps in my writing are obvious, but on her second birthday I must have had a burst of maternal energy—or she napped really well that day—either way I wrote a few things I wanted to remember well before I started We Have This Hope and spent so much time writing about the things I don’t want to forget. Here’s an excerpt from the post…

Apparently So I Won’t Forget…from November 2016

And then March happened. This is mostly content for another post, but for me there is life before March 17th and life after March 17th. Lauren died that day and my world shifted so fast and so hard, I barely have clear memories of that month. For our sweet Ella, her world stayed mostly the same and she stayed mostly the same. For all the chaos that was happening in and around her mother, Ella brought light and consistency and joy. I remember her being so flexible. From being woken up in the middle of the night to napping on the fly at other people's houses, to being fed and dressed and played with by a thousand different relatives and friends. I remember sometime during the first few days afterward, Ella was napping at my in-laws house across the street and I had come over to take a break. She woke and I went to rock her. I remember holding her and begging God to let her sleep in my arms. Not in the way a mother begs out of exhaustion for her child to sleep just a few minutes longer, but out a deep need to remember the goodness of God. I needed just a moment to soak up some of Ella's goodness, her untouched-by-the-world goodness. I needed her to take a deep breath, sigh, and melt into my arms so I could remember that He is good when life is not. And she did. Sweet girl, one day I will tell you much about this season. You were and continue to be such Grace to me.

Remembering goodness in defiance of death

At the time I wrote those words, I had no idea how God would begin to heal my brokenness through remembering. I had no imagination for all the small and hidden ways He would meet me in my sorrow, but I did have a history with Him that pointed to something inherently good.

Recently I was reading through Psalm 116 and noticed how in one breath the author cries out in distress and in another declares the goodness of God. He goes from “the cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow” to “what shall I return to the Lord for all his goodness to me?” in a matter of just nine verses.¹ That’s quite a leap if you ask me—entangled by death suddenly becomes this is so good, what do I owe you for it?

Obviously I’m summarizing a literary shift that’s written likely after its been lived, but I don’t think it’s merely hindsight that’s doing the work here. A slower study of the passage reveals something really beautiful happening in the middle spaces: the psalmist remembers.

“When I was in great need, he saved me…for you, O Lord, have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”²

It’s subtle, but it’s there. What seems like an abrupt shift in attitude is actually the eyes-wide-open fruit of remembering and IT WORKS. Anyone whose held their sleeping child in their arms after a long, hard day knows what remembering the goodness of God can do to a weary soul. In the smallest moment of beholding, our moaning turns to a gratitude that words simply can’t express. How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me…we whisper as our eyes linger on their little cheeks and our minds remember the day we first knew them.

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

In his commentary on Psalm 116, Charles Spurgeon said this about the surprisingly placed question posed in verse 12: “The question of the verse is a very proper one: the Lord has rendered so much mercy to us that we ought to look about us, and look within us, and see what can be done by us to manifest our gratitude.”³

Or said another way, perhaps we should remember.

It sounds like a platitude, but it’s really not.

I’m certainly not suggesting that the experience of grief can be overcome by making a thankfulness list. My hard-earned wisdom in this arena has taught me that grief is more unruly than that, but I’ve also learned that grief and goodness aren’t mutually exclusive. They can co-exist in the great mystery of God’s kingdom—a reality that somehow makes the goodness even sweeter.

One day sorrow, the next morning sunshine.

One moment of sadness interrupted by the delightful squeals of my kids playing outside.

One pang of regret followed by that still small whisper of the Spirit and a friend who remembers.

All these tiny moments add up to a life filled with so much goodness that it bursts at the seams in defiance of all that death threatened to steal.

Photo by frame harirak on Unsplash

When I practice remembering, this is what I’m doing—shaking my fist at brokenness AND quietly collecting the moments that whisper to me this is not the end. The Israelites understood this so well they built all the rhythms of life around it. (You can read more about that here.) The author of Psalm 116 seems to have understood it. And Jesus preached it: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”⁴

Remembering is a practice that has to be cultivated as our lives ebb and flow. When I log all my little So I Won’t Forget notes into the app on my phone and write about them each month, it’s an exercise in training my brain and my heart to remember. It’s a spiritual practice that has held me together, anchored me to the Truth, and caused me to echo the question of the psalmist: how can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?

Make this your November practice

This might be the most cliche time of year to write about gratitude, but who cares? What I’m pitching isn’t trendy and won’t return void. I wonder how you could creatively develop the practice of remembering—framing it as defiance or protection or a softening—whatever works for you personally. I’ve gathered up a few ideas and I’m setting the table for you to taste and see. Would you report back?

• Log your own So I Won’t Forget moments in the notes app on your phone

• If you’re less about the words, make a private photo stream on your phone with pictures of what you want to remember.

• Jump into the beautiful work that

  Sarah E. Westfall
  does with Liturgy of the Little Things.

• If you need to use your hands for this kind of work, let me recommend the latest book from

  Kendall Vanderslice
  - Bake & Pray. She teaches baking as a spiritual practice. Remembering is most certainly woven into this process.

• Get the kids involved, make a list that lives in your kitchen, and build on it together.

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If you enjoyed this, would you share it with a friend? Nothing would thrill me more than knowing other people are reading and engaging with spiritual practice of remembering. Subscribing and commenting is also such a delight!

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1. Psalm 116:3 and Psalm 116:12, New International Version

2. Psalm 116:4, 8-9, New International Version

3. CH Spurgeon commentary on Psalm 116

4. Matthew 5:4, New International Version