Missed Celebrations and the God of Our Memories
Baby showers, graduations, weddings, birthday parties—we’ve missed a lot of special moments lately. Days that were supposed to become forever fixed in our memories have been put on hold all around the world in an effort to protect our neighbors.
Missing out on the opportunity to celebrate a retirement party is well worth the cost in order to save lives. Life is always more important. But just because this truth is real doesn’t change the grief we experience by missing these important days.
Why do these days and events seem to matter so much? Perhaps in their absence, we are given a chance to understand why they even matter. To understand their importance, we must take a closer look at what memories are and how we make them.
WHAT IS A MEMORY?
God has intricately fashioned our world, our bodies, and our personalities. Therefore he has also intricately fashioned our brains. He has wired us to think, to process, and to remember. In his masterful work, he has created our brain to house close to 100 billion neurons, all able to make thousands of connections between other neurons.
As the journalist turned mental athlete Joshua Foer describes it, our memories are bound together by these connections in a “web of associations.” Foer explains that “Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network.”
Interestingly, we can strengthen those memory connections when we involve all our senses in the memory-making process. We remember more clearly when we feel something strongly. It’s the reason we can remember that day in high school when we got our heart broken more vividly than a random Tuesday in October. We remember what moves us. We remember what stands out.
The great thinkers of the medieval ages who were known for their memories understood this, and this is why they stressed the importance of how you felt as you memorized. Mary Carruthers makes a similar argument in her book on memory: “Successful memory schemes all acknowledge the importance of tagging material emotionally as well as schematically.” Memory, then, is a combination of both the mind and the senses.
MORE THAN AN EVENT
So if memory is an intertwined web of associations, as Foer stated, and it is strengthened by our senses, we can see why our seemingly small ceremonies are important to us. It’s because they are an important part of how we make memories. What we mourn is not the act of walking across a stage or opening of gifts. We mourn the excitement, the joy, the pride, the satisfaction, the million other things that go into that day, and that are connected with all our other memories. Graduation day is the culmination of the last four years of our studies, friendships, highs and lows.
Our synapses fire all at once, combining years of experience into one powerful memory that will remain vivid in the years to come. Nobody looks back on their wedding and thinks merely of the taste of the cake or the schedule of the day. The memories mean much more because they are mixed with the associations of the past and the feelings of hope of the future.
These days of celebration, remembrance, and even the sorrow of a funeral give us the chance to pause in an altogether different kind of day. And we use that day to make stronger connections in our memory, as we recall our failures, God’s faithfulness, his comfort, his growth, and his good gifts along the way. We might have brushed important days off as mere traditions that we keep up just because, but God uses these small memorials to serve as important building blocks for our memory.
MEMORIALS IN SCRIPTURE
We can see how God used these patterns throughout the Bible as well. The Feasts of Tabernacles wasn’t initiated to only help the Israelites remember what it was like to live in tents (Lev. 23:42–43). It pointed to much more—to years spent wandering; to the provision of God for manna during the time; to the sins of the Israelites; and to the fulfillment of their entering the Promised Land.
When God told Jacob to build an altar to the Lord because he appeared to him during his escape from Esau (Gen. 35:1), it wasn’t just to commemorate this one act. Jacob said he was going to make an altar to the God “who answers me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone” (Gen. 35:3). The altar commemorated the character of the Lord, the promises he had made to Jacob’s family, and his saving acts in all Jacob’s distress.
Because of how God has wired our brains, our simple memorials and ceremonies hold a world of meaning. And each day that passes, the connections and neurons fire in our brain to continually shape them into something deeper and stronger, as we add even more memories and associations to those special days. This is why I look back on my wedding day with deeper meaning after ten years of marriage than I did on our first anniversary.
Ceremonies give us the opportunity to collect our feelings and memories and imprint them into a moment which becomes a memorial to look back upon and continue to draw deeper meanings from as God continues to grow us.
So what happens when we miss them?
REDEMPTION IN MISSED MEMORIALS
I vividly remember my first Thanksgiving as a mom. My anticipation for our family dinner was brought to a halt when I suffered through the previous night with a fever nearing 104 degrees. For Thanksgiving, I ate a plate of reheated turkey and noodles in my bathrobe. I was fighting MRSA that year, and the infection took our Thanksgiving, my husband’s birthday, and several months of firsts with my newborn. I mourned their loss.
Months later, my infection finally healed and life slowly returned to normal. My husband and I looked back with difficulty, but also with gratitude to God’s faithfulness.
The next Thanksgiving we shared with our family after my sickness, I was beside myself in tears. Why? Because I was adding another memory to my bank; taking in the sights and smells of the familiar and distinct ritual of the fourth Thursday in November. But this time it was even fuller.
It was full of the faithfulness of God in the deepest of trials. It was filled with the reminder of his presence in my uttermost pits, his care for me while I feared, and the faithful prayers of friends and family who rallied around me.
STILL BUILDING MEMORIES
When we once again return to some sort of normal, and when the celebrations and ceremonies resume, perhaps we too will feel experience them more fully? But just because they’ve been skipped doesn’t mean God stopped building important memories, for God is never on hold (Col. 1:17). He is still working, forming us, pouring out his Spirit to convict, encourage, comfort, and unite us to himself.
While we wait, he is building memories as we submit our fears to his sovereign hand. He builds them as our tears flow out in prayer. He builds them with our friends and our church family over Zoom calls that renew our strength.
God has not stopped building memories. And when we join together once again—to celebrate that birthday, to attend a cousin’s graduation, or to speak those wedding vows—we will do so with the knowledge of so many deeper truths and moments to hold on to.
We’ll approach them with a deeper joy, a deeper gratefulness, and a deeper understanding of what the day really holds. By God’s goodness, we’ll hold those memories even stronger, for we will feel them ever fuller.
Brianna Lambert is a wife and mom to three, making their home in the cornfields of Indiana. She loves using writing to work out the truths God is teaching her each day. She is a staff writer with GCD and has contributed to various online publications, such as Morning by Morning and The Gospel Coalition. You can find more of her writing paired with her husband’s photography at lookingtotheharvest.com.