Our Version of Reality = What Happened Yesterday

It's been a moderate winter, here in Kentucky.

Right away, many friends might exclaim, "What are you saying?! Weren't you here during mid-February? Storm after storm! The church's gutter almost got torn clean off by an ice-slide! We saw those pictures of you, shoveling a path all the way from your driveway to the main road!" (hero music here).

But the fact remains that the totality of winter here hasn't been so bad. But because we had a couple of whopper storms late in the season, now we say that this winter was "bad." If you remember back to Christmas 2014, however, winter actually was pretty average. It only got bad at the end.

This is so much like how I remember the past. I remember my worst experiences in bright Technicolor, and forget a lot of the good things God daily did for me, and for us, over long stretches of time. If my most recent days are harsh, then I say the whole season has been harsh. I lack perspective.

Maybe this is a reason why Jesus commanded us to formally remember His death in the Lord's Table, rather than commanding us to commemorate our own conversion experiences? Our memories about many experiences are less than reliable. We are prone to forget important things, and to maximize or minimize events that don't merit the sizes we assign them. My wife remembers family trips that have completely fled my mind. I remember things my friends said or did that they don't remember at all! 

Special man-made days like Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Biblically-ordained ceremonies like baptism and the communion service, and God's decision to write down His words in the form of a book, serve as guards against our emotionalism and mental selectivity. No matter what I do or don't remember about what we were doing on any given day in 1992, Christ was always born in Bethlehem, died for our sins on Golgotha, and rose again on the third day. I'm not floundering around in a swirling stream of my own consciousness.  I have an anchor lodged in the unchangeable history of God coming to save me.