I read about a Jewish woman’s childhood ordeal of hiding from the Nazis in France. Just before her father moved the family into a windowless cellar, he drew her to his side. “We may have to remain inside for a long while,” he told her. “We have to find ways to remember how special this world is.”
He pretended to take an imaginary object off a shelf. “Let’s open a memory bottle,” he said. “We will put into it only the sights, smells, and moments that are most precious to us.”
The little girl’s father had her walk barefoot through the grass to remember how it felt. Together they breathed in the smell of different kinds of flowers and then closed their eyes and recalled the fragrance. They concentrated on the color of the sky and the feel of the breeze.
“Now we will store it all away,” he said, and mimed the act of corking a bottle.
They stayed in the basement a long time. Whenever the girl felt despondent, her father would say, “Pull out a memory from your bottle.” She later recalled, “Sometimes I’d take out a patch of blue sky, sometimes the scent of a rose, and always I felt better. Even after we came out of hiding, I used the memory bottle to sustain me through dark moments.”
In Psalm 77, when a man named Asaph was in tough times, he recalled how God came through for him in the past. “I will remember the deeds of the Lord,” he wrote. “I will remember your miracles of long ago.”
G. Campbell Morgan said, “What we do in the crisis always depends on whether we see the difficulties in the light of God, or God in the shadow of the difficulties.” When Asaph recalled God’s answered prayers in the past, it helped him see his current difficulties in the light of God.
This Sunday, look at Psalm 77 with us and uncork your own memory bottle! We’ll begin our worship service online and on campus at 10am.
--Tom
Tom Goodman serves as pastor at Hillcrest Church in Austin, Texas. His sermons are available on YouTube and the HillcrestToGo Podcast and you can find him on Facebook and Twitter. If someone forwarded this email newsletter to you, sign up here to receive Tom’s weekly devotional in your email inbox.