Why We Need to Remember

How often do you take the time to remember - to think about the past or reflect on things? What does remembering do, and why is it important for us as believers? Join Kristi today as she wraps up the summer “Conversation Series” for a few thoughts about remembering and the benefits it holds for us.

Questions discussed today:
Why is it important to think about the past, or remember? 
What benefits does remembering hold?

Remembering the past:
-Helps us see how far we’ve come. 
-Gives us the ability to see things we couldn’t see before, 
-Look at past events through a different lens.
-Infuses us with the strength to trust God with the challenges we are facing now.

Reasons to listen today:

-Learn how to use events of the past to help you face challenges in the future.
-Discover practical tips about remembering.
-Learn how the Israelites’ complaining (and lack of remembering) affected their faith - and see how the Lord graciously provided for them! 

Scripture references in today’s episode:
Exodus 14-16

Transcript

Even If Podcast with Kristi Lowe

Why We Need to Remember 

August 29, 2023

[00:00:11] hey everybody, and welcome to the Even IF Podcast. I'm your host, Kristi Lowe, and y'all, I'm always so glad whenever we get back together, I hope wherever this finds you this week, you're doing well.

[00:00:22] More than likely. If you are school, you have school-aged kids, or you're a teacher, y'all have all headed back to school and I've been praying protection and . Just provision over each of you guys and, uh, your children as y'all head back into another year. My son is a junior in high school, and then I have a daughter at college.

[00:00:43] And so, I know the nerves that go along with sending our babies back into those classrooms and the dynamics that every kid has. We all have different dynamics for every kid. , I pray that much would be made of God this year and that, uh, your children would see him, that our, teachers would, be protected and that there would just be an abundance of his provision in classrooms this year. That's what I'm claiming over our families and our teachers and our classrooms, since school has started back, that brings us to the end of August and thus the end of our summer series that we have called Conversation Starters. You know, it's funny because when I started this series this summer, I have to, I have to make a confession to y'all.

[00:01:24] Okay. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've probably seen that I've done episodes with other people and other people's stories, and that's primarily been the focus. This is not, I haven't done a ton of stuff for myself, but back in the spring, when I started looking at our summer schedule and

[00:01:41] My travel plans, uh, some potential guest travel plans, and just the coordinating all of that full confession. It was gonna be tough to keep the schedule of having an episode out every Tuesday and schedule guests and coordinate that with their schedules and their travel plans and, and that stuff. So just out of necessity, I decided, you know what?

[00:02:07] I'm gonna do this. I'll just tell my own stories. So that was my workaround. That was how I thought, okay, I'll get around this problem of needing to have guests and, and coordinating all that. And what I didn't realize was that I was about to take a trip down memory lane.

[00:02:23] And I, you know, y'all, y'all came along on that trip when I told y'all about me stealing cars, and my Nana's house and that, . Oh my gosh. My nana, y'all, I could go back. Oh, love my nana. Anyways, but we talked about, I had disappointments. We talked about when I didn't get mascot and how hard that was my senior year.

[00:02:44] we talked about body surfing breakups, boys friendships. we just kind of covered the gamut in a whole lot of areas of life and . What it made me do was take a little bit of a step back. I think a little bit, I saw it in a different lens than I had before.

[00:03:02] and I think that's probably just maybe older and wiser and in some cases, the people in the stories are no longer with us. So I don't know. It was just an interesting, it was an interesting look back, if that's fair to say. It was in the remembering and the seeing things. from my childhood that I, that some patterns began to emerge and some themes about my life.

[00:03:28] Have begun to kind of crystallize in my mind a little bit where, whereas they really had not before. And so I don't know, maybe you guys all take stock and you've already done all that, but it was really kind of, it was kind of neat to see how God had been there all along and what he was creating me to be.

[00:03:48] And I think he does that with all of us. I think he gives us. Opportunities and challenges. And, we have these moments in our lives that shape us. Some of my humor, um, some of the, the things, the ways that I've dealt with life all came because of the things that I lived through.

[00:04:12] And I am pretty sure that that's just about all of us too, . And so, what I want to do is I want us to take a look back, okay. And not at my stories, but at yours. 

[00:04:28] I think it's important for us to remember. . And you know, the way that we remember often is through telling stories. Whenever I would go, when I was first dating, my husband and I would go to their house and, you know, like hang out with his family, for a weekend and they would tell me all sorts of stories about, John when he was a kid and all the things that he did. And it was always so fun hearing those stories. And, somebody would say, oh, I'd forgotten about that, you know, that's why I think we need to take the time to remember, because remembering shows us where we've been, shows us how far we've come. It Remembering shows us what made us who we are. And it shows us what we've overcome when we look back over our life, not just in our childhood, but like our life in general. Remembering gives us the ability to see things maybe that we couldn't have seen before. Or that we had forgotten and now when you look back, you're able to see it in a different light.

[00:05:32] I know that a lot of things in my life, the lens shifted once I had kids, so, you know, remembering is, I think is being able to see his faithfulness. It's able to see where maybe we've fallen down, we've failed. Heaven forbid we talk about our failures in life, right.

[00:05:54] , but it's helped us see how we've picked ourselves up , , and gone on again. Right. you know, when I was preparing for this episode, , one of the things that God showed me was how . You're remembering, you're taking time to look back is generally the way that, that I think we are able to just keep his faithfulness at the forefront of our mind. If we don't, if we don't keep thinking back to what God has done in our lives, we are like so forgetful.

[00:06:22] Like we forget things so fast, like Dory on Finding Nemo. If you haven't watched Finding Nemo, please go watch it. It's the sweetest show. There is another story about Finding Nemo. By the way, that was the first movie John and I ever watched. Whenever we brought our daughter home from the hospital, it was like

[00:06:39] The day after Christmas and everybody has left our house and we decided to watch a movie, and that's the movie we turned on. And the first scene is about the mom getting killed. And I, like, I was sobbed. I was like, oh no, turn it off. I can't, you know, and I was crying anyways. I didn't watch Finding Nemo for like five years, , three years after that.

[00:07:01] but anyway, sorry, but being Dory where you just, you forget things real quickly and . Well, and I'll be the first to tell y'all that I'm the world's worst at remembering. And so when I was preparing for this episode the thing that God reminded me of was Exodus chapter 14 through 16, and it's where Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and out of the slavery that they had been in the bondage, the, the horrible living and working conditions uh, that they had been in. , and he's taking them to the promised land. Right?

[00:07:36] When you get to the middle of chapter 14, what happens?

[00:07:41] The Egyptians are coming for them and God takes them to the Red Sea. He parts the Red Sea. So they walk through on dry land and get to the other side, and then they turn around and they watch God destroy their enemy completely. He covered that water back up and swept them away and provided protection for them in a way that only God could get the glory for.

[00:08:11] So we've seen here, God just protecting these people there is no reason in the world for these people to doubt that God has their back and that he is providing for them, that he's being faithful. And then just like kids who are 30 minutes into a road trip, they start complaining. They're like, we're hungry. We should have just stayed. One of them said, you know, if only the Lord had just killed us back in Egypt, they there we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted, but now you have brought us into this wilderness to starve us all to death.

[00:08:54] First of all, they were under horrible, horrible conditions While they were living in Egypt, and that, oh yeah. Remember they were having to kill some of their children.

[00:09:04] Any boy born was supposed to be killed. I mean, like, Tell me you can't remember that you were being driven hard as slaves. You were being completely taken advantage of. It was a, they were horrible living conditions for them, and here they are, they get a little bit into this. God has already rescued them in the Red Sea and.

[00:09:27] Now they're complaining and they're like, we should just stayed. It would've been better to die than be rescued. I'm like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me? People am. I can only imagine. I mean like if that's my reaction. Can y'all imagine what God's reaction is? Like do you think sometimes he just goes, ah, child of mine, you know that?

[00:09:48] I know he does that with me. I don't know if he does that with you or not, but sometimes this is me. I forget. So what does he do? He gives him manna. Literally manna from heaven every day they would walk outside of their tent or wherever their dwelling that they were living in, in the wilderness, and there was manna enough for the day.

[00:10:10] And then on Saturdays they would get double the portion so they could have their Sabbath. And again, God provided for them, in their complaining. God loved them enough To give them what they needed but part of the reason for their complaining was because they weren't remembering.

[00:10:28] And that's me too. Sometimes I forget how gracious he was to me when I was young and dumb and didn't know better.

[00:10:36] I forget how patient God is with me still today, . You know, it's in our remembering that . We see his faithfulness. It's in our remembering that we can look back and have a better perspective of what God has done in our life. the other thing is remembering and fuses our faith, when we look back, we're strengthened for the challenges ahead.

[00:11:06] When we look back, . We are reminded of what God has done. And so it, it infuses our faith and kind of fills us up in a way that makes us where we can take on the next mountain that's in front of us or the next challenge or the next season that is coming. I thought it was important for us whenever we were wrapping up this summer series to take a minute and talk about remembering because

[00:11:34] As I have remembered all of my silly stories from childhood and, by the way, thank you for being so gracious and letting me share those stories. Some of those things.

[00:11:44] Um, may have been silly, but some of them were really very tender places from my life. And so I just wanted to say thank you for letting me have . Just a little bit of time to share those things with you. It just, you were sweet. Thanks. The irony is not lost on me that next week we're starting a new series called an even If Kind of Faith.

[00:12:08] There are no coincidences in life, y'all. He knew I was gonna need the infusion of my faith, and he knew that.

[00:12:15] Just taking the time to remember. It would be exactly what I needed to be able to do it. Next week we're starting a series called an Even If Kind of Faith. And it's a little bit different than what we've been, we've been talking about not exactly these lighthearted stories.

[00:12:30] Um, I've got several guests lined up for the fall that are talking about a variety of subjects. We are talking everything this year from family estrangement. We're talking about addictions. We're gonna be talking about, anxiety and depression. We're talking about what it's like when we want to quit. I have had conversations with people about when they've made the worst of choices and what God did.

[00:12:59] After that, I've got a, I've got a lot of people coming on this show with some really powerful stories, and what I want us to begin to see through these stories and a few of my own also, is that I want us to be able to see that there is depth in us. I want us to know that our faith is not shallow. We are stronger than we can give ourselves credit for, and we're probably stronger than we could even fathom that we would be. 

[00:13:29] Part of having an, even if kind of faith is . Having a pretty firm grasp of what you've been through. Remembering and seeing how God brought you through it, and then acknowledging that what happened did not change how you see God and how you know that he carried you through it.

[00:13:58] A part of my, even if faith and my, even if story comes from some areas of brokenness in my own life, so next week starts with the prequel because every good story has a good backstory, doesn't it? So I'm really looking forward to sharing that series with you. I can't wait to see what God does through it. Oh my gosh, y'all. And if I can leave you with something, this is the one thing that I keep going back to. I came from a boatload of brokenness.

[00:14:27] I came into adulthood with. More bags than I could carry and not enough strength to hold the load, and what I have realized now and what I am on mission to do now is to help people see that. No matter what areas of brokenness you come from or what has happened in your life, or if you feel like you are not usable by God, it has become a mission in my world to bring stories to people and remind them that he is so faithful , and nothing.

[00:15:06] You have been through. Nothing that has happened to you or because of you. Has made you unusable by God. There's nothing that is unforgivable. There's nothing that you can do to fall outside of his grace and his forgiveness and his mercy, and that's why I started this podcast. And so next week it gets real y'all because.

[00:15:30] Man, I like, I'm trying to like, I'm trying to be cool here because I don't wanna like give, like, give away the farm. But y'all, I was a messed up human . I was so jacked up when I came into adulthood that all I can say to you is that if he can redeem the messiest, darkest, dirtiest. Ugliest places in me of all people.

[00:16:02] He can do it in you too. And so that's what we're talking about this fall, and I can't wait for it, I forgot to, to say this at the beginning of the show, but if you haven't subscribed to our newsletter, go over to even if podcast.com, So go over there, check that out. If this is a blessing to you and if you think this episode would be a blessing to someone, share it with them.

[00:16:59] And as always, if you haven't found us over on social media, go find us. We're kind of a fun group. I kind of like you people. I think that that just about does it for us today.

[00:17:08] Guys, thanks so much for being here and good Lord willing, I'll see you next week.