RRR_Discipling_Age&Memory
Memory is a strange thing. It’s attached to emotions, and as you age and experience life again and again, memory begins to change. It tends to drift toward certain objective events that, in the past, felt significant, and it tends to float toward the ones you want to remember. Memory is odd.
In people, memory becomes even stranger as aging and experience pile up across a lifetime. A thirty-year-old may have a sharp recollection of things from their teenage years. By forty, the mind starts to blur the edges, remembering more of the positive outcomes than the negative. At fifty, memory becomes more selective, pushing away things that weren’t pleasant, though some of them still remain and cannot be erased. By sixty, memory has become almost entirely selective.
A person remembers what they choose to remember, and the rest is pushed back into the recesses of the mind, where it no longer functions in daily thought.
Remembering is vitally important to staying in touch with Jesus Christ. When you read the Word of God, and the Word reads you, that is an experience.
And if you cannot recall that experience, if you cannot bring it to mind, then what value does it hold for others when you share it?
Discipleship is about sharing experience. It is about passing along what you have lived. The feel of the day, the flavor of the morning—the sun burning, the air sharp, people moving about—what really happened in that moment? Because there is always a difference between what you perceive and what someone else perceives.
Three people can witness the same accident and give three different accounts of how it happened. Our perceptions do not perfectly overlap. But there is one book where the witness is interwoven and the testimony stands as one—the Bible.
In Scripture, over sixty-eight thousand ideas, words, and concepts are interlinked, all connected before “networking” or “interconnecting” were even part of human speech.
The Bible is powerful in that way. But it becomes even more powerful when you read it and know it speaks to you. You realize: this is true.
This Jesus, this Word made flesh, came and died for me so that I might be born again, and so that I might bring others to know Him. That is powerful.
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