Memories

Memories. 

Sometimes they can float in like a feather coming in for a soft landing and are beautiful. Other times they can crash and burn the insides of your mind, causing chaos that can last anywhere from seconds to years. Many are forgotten, never to be seen again. Others seem to make up the very core of your existence. Some are big, others are small. They can be accurate or lead us astray. Some are only known by you and others are shared by a mass multitude. 

No matter which kind of memory it is, once I stop to think about it, it shows just how complex the brain is and how big a Creator we have. 

I had an experience last week when my family and I dealt with all the different types of memories. My dad had triple bypass surgery. They cut him wide open, did their thing of making bridges where there are none, and sewed him back up. Praise God - it was successful. An intriguing thing about this surgery was that my mom went through something similar a few years ago, so memories were rampant. 

As I walked into his ICU room for the first time after the surgery, I remembered that my mom was more swollen than my dad was right after surgery. I noticed that my mom’s room had been one room over from where his was. I recalled the beautiful sunsets I had seen while driving home from the hospital years ago and wondered if I would have the same experience. Without those memories this current experience would have been different. There was a sense of having been here before. 

There was also a lot of “new.” I have three kids this go-round, so the timing of visits was different and my energy level may have been different. Although, I still never left his room without praying and helping and listening. 

My mom had her own battle with memories this week. The trauma of her own past hospital stay—and even the physical reaction she has to the hospital chemicals—made it incredibly hard for her to visit. But she did anyway. She pushed past those overwhelming memories and came once, on a day when she hadn't received any updates all day and just needed to see him.

Inside the room, memory was playing a different kind of game with my dad. He told his nurse that it was his first hiccup episode since the surgery. I immediately said, “No, it isn’t,” because I remembered him mentioning hiccups a day or two earlier. Hiccups after heart surgery are no joke; they shake your core where you’ve just been cut open eight inches. The nurse said they’re normal but un-helpable because of a nerve that gets irritated during surgery. There are many reasons why we may not remember something. Sometimes, it’s a gift to forget the things in the past that have caused us pain. 

It was hard for my dad to wrap his head around this being a different experience than what my mom, his “one flesh,” went through, which he wrote a book about. He won’t be spending 44 days in the hospital. In fact, he was out in eight. He didn’t have to stay longer in the hospital to get the infection out of the heart before surgery, he didn’t have to do inpatient rehab after. It was a different situation, but because it dealt with the same organ and the same hospital—and with so few years in between—it makes sense that the memories came swooping in like a bird of prey. 

We may enjoy the memories or we may not want to touch them with a ten foot pole. But they’re still there. Taunting us or teaching us. Taming us or tormenting us. 

No matter what kind they are, God can use them. To grow us and shape us or to teach us to leave them at His feet. If we allow that. We can hold on to them so tight that it hurts, or we can release them to His sovereign control. We can do that by clenching and releasing our hands while praying that He hold the emotions of a specific memory and claiming His custody of that memory when it pops up again and again. 

I am thankful that my Creator has given me—instead of a heart-shaped pillow to cushion the hard jolts of life—His Son, who gives comfort like nothing else.