The Power of Memory: Life and Lessons from the Past Year

At the close of the year I want to encourage you to go back through your journals, back through the little spaces we give you to make notes in your class and retreat workbooks, and drink in what God has been saying to you over the last year. How quickly we forget the thoughts, words and impressions that come to us from God throughout the year and how much we need to remember his sweet whispers!

If you would like to share, I would love to hear the treasures you find!

If I consider my desolations from 2024 at the top of the list would be the loss of my husband Sam, with whom I shared our marriage for 38 years. At the same time I have a very strong sense that he is yet alive in heaven and that he sees what we are going through on earth—and is cheering us on. My second desolation would be the injury to the middle finger on my dominant hand which has affected all of my hand. Although the flesh has healed, the hand is stiff and not very useful. My occupational therapist encourages me with the good news that usually around nine months out from the injury the stiffness diminishes. If I continue to force the joints to bend I will regain use of my hand, albeit with a slightly shorter middle finger.

My consolations are the love of my family and friends, meaningful work, a strong sense of the Lord's presence, and the promise from God that the final third of my life will be the most rich, the most nourishing, and the most joyful of my life. Hard to imagine in the throes of grief, but I look with hope to him who has promised me!

I leave you with this quote from CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain:

“My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in an ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for tomorrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, and suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or headline in the newspaper that threatens us all with destruction, send this whole pack of cards tumbling down.

At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeeded, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days.

Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but 48 hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over – I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

I thank God that he never gives up on me nor will he ever give up on you!

Merry Christmas beloved children of the King of King!

Love,

Betsy