Forgetting and Remembering

Happy Mother's Day!  I am sure I never say this often enough, but I have a wonderful Mother who blesses every aspect of my life.  She has been supportive and encouraging in every aspect of my life.  She has never allowed me to quit a single worthy endeavor, but at the same time has been encouraging when my best efforts proved to be insufficient for the effort at hand.  Whenever there is a problem, I know that she will listen and provide me with the encouragement and support I need.  I owe her more than I can ever adequately describe.

I apologize for a pictureless post today, but my Mac has been on the fritz and needs a new logic board when I get back to Utah this week.

It's hard to believe that this week I will move back to Utah without the necessity of returning to Texas in three months.  I can't wait to see my family again and spend time with them and with so many friends who have blessed my life.  These thoughts of returning to Utah coincided with the Gospel Doctrine lesson in my ward today.  I had been released, so I did not teach the lesson, but as we talked about the book of Deuteronomy, we discussed the topic of "remembering" and why it means so much to us.  In the process of that discussion, we also discussed the problem of "forgetting" leading one person to raise an interesting question.  He asked, "If remembering is so important, why does God make it so easy for us to forget?"

During this discussion, I came to a realization that I had never thought of before: The ability to forget is a great blessing.  Obviously there are things in our lives which, if forgotten will lead us into trouble.  If we forget the Lord and His commandments, we will inevitably experience the pain that grows out of disobedience.  If we forget the Savior's atonement, we will inevitably fail to honor His sacred name and sacrifice.  But imagine a mortal world in which we could not forget anything?  Imagine a world in which we perfectly and vividly remembered all of our pains and struggles, all of the distress that we had ever experienced.  If we were incapable of forgetting some things, we could never move forward.  The ability to forget, to have our pains and struggles dulled with time, is a tremendous blessing.

One of the trendiest fields in history at the moment is the "Memory study."  The idea is that people make conscious and unconscious choices about the things that they remember and forget in history.  Sometimes these choices are detrimental, as people choose to forget important aspects of their history while remembering things that skew the story in certain ways.  For example, one author argued that after the 1870s, Americans had downplayed the role of slavery in their memories of the cause of the Civil War.  This allowed the nation to heal and made equal heroes out of both the North and the South, but at the same time undermined the important process of healing America's struggles with racism, leaving that healing till the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement.  While the merits of that argument are certainly debatable, I like the idea that we make choices about what we remember and what we forget, as it allows us to have a choice in defining our own individual stories.

There are things that we need to choose to forget, and there are things that we need to choose to remember.  Does this skew the story?  Of course it does.  But if in our forgetting, we bury past hurts and past offenses away with the refuse of our lives, we have an opportunity to begin anew and strengthen the relationships that those hurts had damaged.  In our remembering, we can choose to let go of the pain and the hurt, and choose to remember the healing and the miracles of God all along the way that enabled us to grow from our struggles.  We can choose to grow.  We can choose to heal.  We can choose to remember God's love and forget the injustices we may have suffered.

May we choose the right things to remember and choose the right things to forget.  May we use the gift of forgetfulness as it was truly intended to be used and bury the pains of bygone days in the past that we might build toward a brighter future on the Rock of Christ.

Brett