Your Life Tells a Story... Re-member the Past

You’ve heard it before — “An unexamined life is not worth living.” I don’t believe that every moment of every day has to be dissected into meaningful purpose. Daily tasks are daily tasks. Getting the oil changed is just what we have to do some days. Nothing wow about that, right? But remembering the past is something else, and it’s purpose is not to be nostalgic about yesteryear and disenchanted about today. Remembering is a path that leads to wholeness, healing, and opportunities to pick up clues about who God is in the story of our lives. In remembering we find our wisdom, learn our lessons, and grow up into mature people.

I learned to love remembering the past as a tool for meditating and listening for God at work in the studio of the soul after meditating on the word itself. Re-member. If all our faculties — the literal “members” of our body, our memoires, experiences, knowledge, senses, emotions, personality, physical being — remain disconnected from our consciousness, we become disjointed, separated from the whole, dis-membered or dis-integrated. So re-membering is the reconnecting and gathering of all those parts and pieces into the dwelling place of God.

There’s no one way to begin re-membering your life story. In fact I’d love to hear your creative ways of remembering and embracing your past life, the life-giving past as well as those seasons you might label as disastrous or regretful. There are no unredeemable moments of life. No regrets that cannot be tools of transformation in the hand of Divine grace. So whether it’s sorting through old photo albums, or journaling through the decades, or painting images of remembrance, let your life find its voice to tell its sacred story, first to your own heart, then to the Divine within, and if you are feeling brave enough, share your remembering with a trust first or spiritual companion.