Last week I had another birthday!

This year, there were friends to visit and things to see around the country, so to celebrate we went on a road trip! We hit nine states in four days which put our truck at 1,888 miles in one trip and spent enough on gas and fast food to make anyone’s wallet seem significantly more empty…

Nevertheless, the trip was amazing and each great sight is one I hope I will never forget! All of us took plenty of pictures and at the end of every day my family gathered in a hotel to discuss our favorite part. Needless to say, as we changed states and time zones multiple times a day, it became hard to remember which day we did what. We spent a while talking and laughed about how long it took to recount each day perfectly (even since we have returned home we have disputes about what happened which day).

Our trip happened less than a week ago. Yet the memories are already abstract.

Memories are funny like that, I’ve learned. You try to grasp them and even the ones you seem to remember with perfect crispness can have parts that are entirely imaginary. Studies published in Psychological Science¹ observe that at least one element of each memory is imaginary and memories from early life can be entirely fictional. Professor Stephen Chew writes, “Memory doesn’t record our experiences like a video camera. It creates stories based on those experiences. The stories are sometimes uncannily accurate, sometimes completely fictional, and often a mixture of the two; and they can change to suit the situation.” Memories fade the moment they are over so you can never perfectly recall all of the detail of a scene. It is a complex but unfortunate truth.

Of all of the things I have ever been afraid of, I’ve always been afraid of forgetting. Not the simple stupidities of life like remembering where I put my car keys or under which pillow I deposited a pair of socks for later (because who needs important things like car keys and socks anyway??) but the big memories. It always drove me to documentation, which is unsurprisingly one of the many ways my love flowed into writing.

On the trip, I would catch myself thinking ‘I have to remember this detail’ or staring at something for long enough until I was positive it would be ingrained in my mind. I took too many pictures and wrote down a lot of things about what I saw. I wanted to soak up each moment, hold firm in my grasp each tangible thing about it and never let it go. One morning on the drive I was watching the sun blaze at blinding intervals through the trees and I realized through the lense of my phone’s smudgy camera that even what footage I could gather of it would do no justice. God is the only one who can truly bank together all of our memories in a safe. Yet these feeble visions we remember on earth are nothing compared to what He sees.

We see beauty but God sees something more. He knows beauty. It isn’t just a pleasing sight to him but a work of art of which he knows both the story and the function. Riding through the fields, I only had the knowledge of a traveller passing through. Isn’t that all we know compared to God’s dated understanding of everything we see? 

I tried to think about the meaning — that field was a farmer's field and those trees had been ardently grown by a Creator on high. The Illinois landscape which seemed to stretch on forever was just a moment’s work to God. Each house was months of building or months of savings for a young couple — each homestead a story of children who had helped nurture it but grown up and left. Couldn’t I see that under every moment, there were greater works done by Him?

If you have been to Bible study with me over the past few years, you know that I prayer journal. It is something I adopted when I was a tween, admittedly because I found it a convenient way to express all of my disordered thoughts. Over the years I have been in and out of the practice but now every time I come back to it I am reminded it can truly be the purest way of documenting thoughts. This isn’t to praise one way of praying, writing, or thinking over another — but I think prayer journaling is perhaps the best combination of the three.

On the trip I started doing it more than often after that day. I thanked God for the things that I saw him doing and not just the dips and rises of the landscape that I let my eyes follow for enjoyment. There was something deeper there, something greater than just human memories. I am thankful that I lifted praise to God because it made the time much richer for the fact I couldn’t help but think of how great His faithfulness is.

Everything I saw didn’t have a great story. Looking out at a field to see its beauty (I keep referring to fields because that is literally all there is in Illinois) didn’t mean it didn’t have a hard history of drought and people fighting over the land. The arch in Missouri and the winding Mississippi River certainly didn’t suggest perfection with their beauty. But each one was a work of art for the time, an image that God had been faithful to someone, somewhere, who had labored to make it so. It is hard not to think of how faithful God has been to you when you think of the world that way.

I know I have said this before but I will say it again. Isn’t it amazing that God is still writing our stories? Isn’t it wonderful that he still cares how it ends, that he also cares about each thoughtful detail works together? He sees the big picture yet he still hears us when we pray to Him on minor details. He has been human so he is no stranger to how big the small things can feel. Each thing happening in our lives is something deeper then — because a God is behind it all, writing His story, showing His faithfulness, and revealing bit by bit His glorious plan. He doesn’t hide the story from us, we just have to look. 

What a wonder it is that we can see things just slightly as he sees them — that we both see the same sun, the same earth, the same stars, and the same Son of God?

In the end on my trip, much was documented. I won’t give a number for how many pictures were restlessly snapped but let's just say it should only be legal for professional travel photographers to take as many as I did. Much was written down but neither the words nor the pictures quite captured the beauty of Creation. The only things that came close to rightful descriptions were the praises lifted up to God. 

Praising him is like praising creation in the way it was meant to be praised. Praising him is reveling in achievements and our own simple successes in the most fulfilling way. Praises to him aren’t always the same — times get hard and we find ourselves calling out to him with different words in between them. But one thing is certain; if all of the memories made on earth melt in an instant when we die, if they condense to rights and wrongs at judgement or dissipate entirely to unexplained recognitions in heaven, the ways to praise our God will still never cease to emerge. 

We own so little in this world — this world isn’t ours to own but for the Author’s work who knows it infinitely better than we do. Isn’t it the most beautiful and rational reaction to employ perhaps only everlasting practice — praising Him? Is it delusional to ask the Creator of it all for aid when we face earthly trials — to call to Him who made the earth? 

Logical as it may be, it is for us to choose. He lets us decide when to praise him. He doesn’t hide His faithfulness but has painted it across the world with His own blood so anyone who’s hopeless and knows it can turn and accept His great Gift. Whether you’ve accepted it or not, don’t miss the opportunities to see the beauty in the stories He is writing. Each sunrise is a testimony in the midst of lamentation - a great faltering in a line of sorrowful verses to sing “great is His faithfulness”.

©Goodstrong Words April 2022