Remembered

I ran into her on the streets several months later. The last time I had seen her she was strung out sitting and on her front steps while I was talking with her about sending her son to camp with the church. She's had a lucid moment remembering her own church camp experience as a child and wanted her son to go, too.

This meeting was quite different from the last. She looked healthy and had cleaned herself up. When she saw me she quickened her step toward me.

"Pastor, I'm so glad to see you. I want to let you know that I've been off the heroin for six months now!" We celebrated that good news together.

She went on to say, "I was planning on coming to your church but before I did I went back to that church that sent me to camp when I was a kid just to thank them. And when I got there, they all REMEMBERED me! I hope you don't mind but I've been going there ever since."

I'm venturing to guess that the memories they shared of each other were selective. I doubt they spent time dwelling on the memory of how long she'd been gone. I would guess that the memories they shared weren't of the disappointment the congregation went through when she left them for drugs. I even think that most of the strolls down memory lane didn't include the times that I'm sure she, as a teen, gave them a run for the money.

Instead, the memories were focused on who she really was inside. The memories were about the good times and the mutual blessing they had been to one another. They remembered HER.

I don't get much choice in how people remember me. The impressions that they have of me are out of my control. Yes, I can behave in ways that help provide the materials that people use to form images and memories, but those impressions are in their minds, not mine.

But when I accept this lack of control over my own image, I realize that I do have control over every other person's image inside me. I get to choose how I remember others.

I can easily choose to look at each person as a series of crystal clear bad decisions played out over and over again in some form of tragic drama. I can hold close to me the times they've hurt me and wallow as I remember my own superiority.

Or, I can choose a tougher lens to help focus my vision. No, it's not the Pollyanna way of looking only for the good. It's that foggy glass view that seeks to squint through what's going on in someone's life and see who is really there. It's trying to see what the Creator had in mind when the idea of this person was first imagined by Him. It's choosing to start from the place of knowing that whoever I see is somehow created in the image and likeness of the One who breaths life into each of us.

And it's remembering the words of scripture which say, "and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more." (Hebrews 8:12 KJV) God chooses to remember who He created in me despite what I've done. This is the heavenly experience of His love, mercy, and grace poured out upon me.

I don't have control over how other people remember me. Gladly, I do know my Redeemer chooses to remember the ME that few others, including myself, ever get a good look at.

And when I get to meet Him face to face, I think the experience might be a bit like what happened to my neighbor when she went back to the church of her youth. That little group of faithful church-goers provided a glimpse of heaven here on earth. May I do likewise with all I meet.

Jesus remember me when You come into Your kingdom. Help me bring about Your kingdom in this time and place by seeing myself and others as You see us.