Anxiety, Fear, Conflict? This Tool is a Must!
Intentional remembrance is a power tool for times of stress, fear, and conflict. It helps us refocus, refuel, and refuse damaging relationship cycles.
God made remembering a big deal in the Old Testament, and Jesus made it a priority in the New Testament.
Intentional remembering help us:
- refocus from our circumstances to God's capacities when we're anxious and afraid
- refuel with confidence when facing discouragement or difficult decisions
- refuse to get caught in "last situation finality" cycles in relationships
When used to process, not prosecute -- ourselves or someone else -- intentional remembering is one of the most powerful tools we have that's always ready to pick up and use!
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Transcript
How could intentional remembering help you in your faith, in your emotional health, and in your relationships?
Speaker A:We're going to talk about that today.
Speaker A:Stay tuned.
Speaker B:If your desire is to become spiritually stronger, emotionally healthier, and relationally smarter, you're at the right place.
Speaker B:Speaker and writer Stephanie Smith inspires and equips you to achieve these three key aims.
Speaker B:If you're a parent, you also learn how to raise empowered kids ready for adulthood.
Speaker B:Let's get started.
Speaker A:When this episode originally airs, we will have just commemorated Memorial Day here in the United States.
Speaker A:The day before this was originally known for a while as Decoration Day, before it became an official federal holiday because it began in the Civil War when the grave sites of both Union and Confederate soldiers were decorated with flowers.
Speaker A:And now people go to cemeteries, often on Memorial Day, and they remember and they decorate the graveside, not just of veterans, but of family members who have passed or friends or special acquaintances.
Speaker A:And the power of remembrance cannot be overstated.
Speaker A:I've had the privilege of being both at the cemetery to commemorate Gettysburg, the Battle of Gettysburg during the U.S.
Speaker A:civil War.
Speaker A:And I've also been able to see the ceremony that takes place at Arlington National Cemetery and also at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Speaker A:And those processions and events are sobering, not in a depressing way, but they are also very inspiring.
Speaker A:They remind us of the cost of freedom and the cost of liberty, and they remind us of what is it that is worth giving our lives for.
Speaker A:There is value in stopping to intentionally commemorate, to remember, to memorialize events, priorities, rights, responsibilities, all of these things that we have as individuals or that we have, particularly here in the United States, as citizens.
Speaker A:But what can remembrance, what can intentional remembrance do in our individual lives when it's not related to a federal holiday that for many people is filled with barbecues and trips to the lake and the start of vacation?
Speaker A:Or for some people, it's the opportunity to do a massive clean out the garage day or some other such thing.
Speaker A:But what about on a more ongoing basis?
Speaker A:You know, the Old Testament is filled with memorial days.
Speaker A:If a person goes back and looks at all of the different feasts and festivals that God established for his people, beginning with the Mosaic covenant and then moving forward over time, you couldn't go for more than three or four months without there being a feast or festival.
Speaker A:And they were all tied to something that God said.
Speaker A:You're going to have this feast or festival because I want you to remember something.
Speaker A:I want you to remember how I brought you out of Egypt.
Speaker A:I want you to remember the deliverance that came in the land of Persian when the decree of King Ahasuerus went out, more commonly known to us as the story of Esther, that's recorded in the Old Testament.
Speaker A:And then God gave specific instructions, and he would have people at different times to set up monuments and memorials.
Speaker A:And then he would say, make sure you remind each other and teach your children to remember why these memorials and these monuments are here.
Speaker A:And it didn't stop in the Old Testament, because as we move on into the New Testament, Jesus instituted one of the most commonly practiced memorials today, and that is communion.
Speaker A:And he said, do this, do this regularly in remembrance of me.
Speaker A:So why the emphasis on this?
Speaker A:Why be intentional?
Speaker A:To remember.
Speaker A:You know, so many times we have things that can just pop back into our memory, and we're like, we don't even know where that came from or why it showed up.
Speaker A:And it seems to me that most of the time, the things that just randomly pop back into our memory aren't the real happy moments.
Speaker A:They tend to defer a little bit more to the unhappy or unpleasant or embarrassing or regretful kinds of things.
Speaker A:But there is power for us in remembering, as I said at the beginning, both in our faith, in our emotional health, and in our relationship.
Speaker A:So let's kind of break those down first of all, in our relationship with God.
Speaker A:One of the most sobering stories in the Bible to me is after the Israelites had left the land of Egypt where they had been enslaved, and they go through all of these different scenarios where they need water, they need provision, they need protection, they need direction, and.
Speaker A:And every single time God shows up and he provides for them in one way after the other, and yet they never come to the point of saying, when they encounter the next situation, you know what, we're going to stop and remember what just happened.
Speaker A:We're going to stop and remember not just from hundreds of years ago.
Speaker A:We're going to stop and remember from, like, I don't know, two weeks ago, two days ago.
Speaker A:And we are now going to adjust how we show up based on our remembrance.
Speaker A:They didn't do that every time.
Speaker A:It was like they were meeting God for the first time.
Speaker A:And was he going to show up and provide what they needed at this point?
Speaker A:And when they finally get to Canaan and they're ready to go into this land where they're going to be able to go home, I mean, this was the homecoming for them.
Speaker A:And to be able to set up their towns and their villages and their cities and to no longer live enslaved what did they do?
Speaker A:They refused to remember.
Speaker A:And they approached God with the same attitude that they had done on countless times before.
Speaker A:Basically, this is too big for us.
Speaker A:We don't know why you brought us out here.
Speaker A:We're not going to be able to go into this land.
Speaker A:Have you heard the reports of who's over there?
Speaker A:And their lack of faith that was caused by their refusal to remember God's faithfulness to them cost them dearly.
Speaker A:It cost them opportunities for the rest of their life.
Speaker A:And when their kids all grew up, they remember the cost of that for their parents and their grandparents.
Speaker A:And they said, we're not doing that.
Speaker A:And they adopted a different attitude in part because they had chosen to remember and to learn the lessons from history.
Speaker A:And that is something that we can do and must do for ourselves as individuals.
Speaker A:We can remember, certainly we can remember the stories from the scripture, but we can also look back and remember how has God showed himself faithful to us in our own individual lives and situations?
Speaker A:And this is one of the reasons that having a gratitude journal or a spiritual growth journal or, or a just some sort of journal where you have the opportunity to just jot down the types of things where you're able to look back and go, oh yeah, God, God did show up there in the way that he made provision, that person was, was healed, that need was met, that bill did get paid.
Speaker A:I did get direction in what I should do with going to college or job or that friendship did end, but it was because it needed to end.
Speaker A:And God gave me the strength to walk away from that bad relationship or you know what, God me gave me the strength to resolve the issues and, and now I still have that relationship.
Speaker A:And when you jot things down like this, you don't have to think of it in terms of.
Speaker A:You don't have to write an entire narrative.
Speaker A:But the power of remembrance is something that is not a suggestion that the Bible makes.
Speaker A:It's not God saying, you know, if you guys just don't have anything better to do, you know, then, well, occasionally you just might want to remember.
Speaker A:No, no, no.
Speaker A:It is remember, remember, remember, remember.
Speaker A:And you have to be intentional about it.
Speaker A:You can't just count happening naturally because that's not the way that our brains work.
Speaker A:And how can remembering help us emotionally?
Speaker A:Well, obviously there's that component of it that we just talked about that applies to our relationship with God that gives us the strength to be able to walk out the directions of our lives, but it also is able to help us even if we don't tie it to a matter of faith.
Speaker A:Because one of the ways that people grow confidence, they grow security, they maintain an emotional fitness and health is when they remember where.
Speaker A:Where they've been and what they've overcome.
Speaker A:One of the things that you can do when you're facing a hardship in life right now is to look back and go, you know what.
Speaker A:What are the other hard things that I faced before and I was able to get through them?
Speaker A:And as you are able to go back and you remember those things, you will also be able to say, okay, how did I get through those?
Speaker A:What were the tools that I used?
Speaker A:And sometimes it's a matter of course of looking back and going, I didn't handle that very well.
Speaker A:So what can I even learn from that?
Speaker A:What can I learn not to.
Speaker A:To do from that?
Speaker A:Oftentimes when, when we're in the midst of.
Speaker A:Of the chaos and the drama or the frustration of the moment, we can lose sight.
Speaker A:We can become very singularly focused, or we become very binary focused.
Speaker A:Okay, it's good, it's bad, it's right, it's wrong.
Speaker A:We have this choice or that choice, and we deprive ourselves of the confidence that we need to kind of settle ourselves down a little bit, to settle our brains down and to be able to think creatively, and we miss opportunities that might be right there in front of us.
Speaker A:Now there is an unhealthy part of remembering, which is when we go back and we just dredge up negative things, not for the purpose of learning from them, not for the purpose of saying, yeah, you know, that's how I used to respond.
Speaker A:But you know what?
Speaker A:I don't respond like that anymore.
Speaker A:I need to be able to see that as growth, and that can help me to know that I can continue to grow and I can count on being an even better person, a more confident person, a more calm person in the future.
Speaker A:That's the good part of remembering.
Speaker A:What we don't want to do is go back and dredge up stuff just for the sake of rehashing it.
Speaker A:There's a difference between looking back at things in the past in order to process and learn from them and in order to just rehash them, where we just get stuck and we stay stuck.
Speaker A:So we want to remember, but we want to remember intentionally with the purpose of drawing insights that can help us in whatever situations that we're in right now.
Speaker A:Now, this technique of intentional remembering with a purpose, when we are in a situation where maybe we're dealing with depression or anxiety Or.
Speaker A:Or decision fatigue or fear or paralysis.
Speaker A:There's a couple of benefits in the sense that one is it can help us to look back and say, you know what?
Speaker A:I've done hard things before.
Speaker A:I've made hard decisions before.
Speaker A:I've overcome and walked out of depression before.
Speaker A:And we can say, I do see where there has been growth.
Speaker A:I can do that again.
Speaker A:And sometimes we're able to look back and to say, wow, I really am a different person now.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And that can help us when we have those times that we might be looking at ourselves and just wanting to beat ourselves up and to just get sidetracked.
Speaker A:Moving from a healthy regret that can fuel us to change into an unhealthy regret that just gets us wallowing and frustration with ourselves.
Speaker A:So again, we want to remember, but with the intentionality that we are remembering for a purpose, and that is to process, to glean inside so that we can apply those moving forward.
Speaker A:Intentional remembrance can be a tremendous antidote to anxiety.
Speaker A:Anxiety is often more fear and frustration about the future.
Speaker A:And when we look back to the past, then we are able to go, okay, now there's some tools back there.
Speaker A:I've already seen how they work.
Speaker A:Those are still available.
Speaker A:I can pick those up and I can use them now.
Speaker A:Because if all we do is stay focused on what's in the future and the unknown and the uncertainty, we deprive ourselves of the resources that we need in order to be able to move into the future.
Speaker A:And here, again, this is where keeping some sort of personal growth journal can be very helpful.
Speaker A:Because in those times, you can look back and say, oh, yeah, when I had that really hard decision to make, I did make that.
Speaker A:You know, sometimes we go through things and we think, oh, I will never forget this.
Speaker A:And then we do.
Speaker A:And being able to move something out of our brain and out of our memory into a written form is a powerful tool that we can go back and say, ah, yes, okay, and we can draw real strength from that.
Speaker A:So how does intentional remembrance help us to be relationally smart?
Speaker A:There are two specific ways that I want to talk about today.
Speaker A:Now, there's more than just that, but we're going to talk about these two.
Speaker A:The first is it can empower us to avoid the trap of last experience finality.
Speaker A:Have you ever noticed as people that we can have a tendency to lock people into a box?
Speaker A:We have an experience with someone and say they were rude.
Speaker A:That's just who they are.
Speaker A:And this is one of those things that leadership, the book Leadership and Self Deception.
Speaker A:Talks about and helps us to be able to get out of the box ourselves and to let other people out of the boxes that we put them into.
Speaker A:Last experience finality is when we say about someone, this is who they are based on whatever our last experience with them was.
Speaker A:And this is a very harmful relational pattern, but it's also an incredibly covert one that can be really hard to pick up on.
Speaker A:And part of the reason for that is because often it happens between a person who is very much a giver, they want to please, they want to move forward, they, they're very happy and in trying to bring nurturing the relationship and someone else who frankly is, is more self centered.
Speaker A:Now that doesn't make the first person all good and the second person all bad.
Speaker A:It's, it's on, on a spectrum.
Speaker A:It's a continuum there.
Speaker A:And so this can happen to people who are basically good, but in this particular area they can start holding somebody else hostage and excusing themselves from responsibility because basically they end up doing just what the Israelites did.
Speaker A:Every time they run into a new frustration with this other person and the relationship, all they want to look at is their current situation and they don't.
Speaker A:They refuse to go back and remember how that person has shown up in the past for them.
Speaker A:And usually this shows up when someone is wanting something and their, their desire might be totally legitimate, it might not be a bad or selfish desire, but how they're going about getting it can be selfish.
Speaker A:So it might look something like this.
Speaker A:Say you have a, a friend or a family member or colleague who wants to borrow some money.
Speaker A:And we're not talking an exorbitant amount, we're just talking.
Speaker A:But it's more than just a couple of bucks.
Speaker A:And you have already lent this person a good amount of money over the time and this time you decide to say no.
Speaker A:And rather than remembering all the other times that you had lent them money, they just want to look at this last experience with you and say you're selfish, you don't care about me, you never want to help me out.
Speaker A:And oftentimes the person who is, is the giver in this gets frustrated and, and they get flummoxed and it's like, oh no, no, I don't want you to think that about me.
Speaker A:And they end up giving them the money or lending them the money, but it's out of a sense of compulsion because really what's happened there is.
Speaker A:And the person in that scenario who's wanting to borrow the money, they're being Relationally dumb because that's not growing a sustainable, healthy relationship.
Speaker A:So they might get something in the short term, but in the long term that's going to cause them.
Speaker A:And then the person who gives in to the manipulation because they don't see it as manipulation, then it's dumb on their part because they're also not nurturing what's going to be a societal, sustainable, healthy relationship over the long term.
Speaker A:And this is where both people have a responsibility to go back.
Speaker A:And let's remember.
Speaker A:Let's remember the past.
Speaker A:This isn't about dredging up the past in order to throw mud in somebody's face for something that they did wrong and has already truly been dealt with.
Speaker A:This is about remembering in order to treat someone fair, fairly about who are they really and how does that get revealed over a period of time.
Speaker A:If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are feeling like, man, I feel like I keep giving to this person and I keep showing up for them, but it never seems to be enough.
Speaker A:It's like I'm pouring water into a bucket that has holes in it.
Speaker A:You're probably dealing with some level of dynamic here of someone who is only going to judge you on the basis of whatever their last experience with you was.
Speaker A:And that is not relationally smart for either individual.
Speaker A:Now, you might not be able to get them to see what's happening.
Speaker A:And even if you can, they might not have any interest in changing that.
Speaker A:But you can change how you are handling that and how you are going to show up and not get pulled into that destructive dynamic.
Speaker A:And one of the ways that you can do that is to remind yourself, first of all, you know what?
Speaker A:I have shown up for this person on all these other occasions.
Speaker A:I have helped them out before.
Speaker A:This time I'm saying no.
Speaker A:And you don't judge yourself based on the current situation.
Speaker A:You look back to evaluate who you are and how you've showed up over a period of time.
Speaker A:Time.
Speaker A:And you might also point that out to the other person.
Speaker A:And if they are mature or they're on a path of growing into maturity, they have a willingness to.
Speaker A:To grow.
Speaker A:Then they would be able to go, oh, yeah, you know what?
Speaker A:You're right.
Speaker A:You have been there and you've helped so many different times.
Speaker A:And this is not fair for me to now label you as not caring and not wanting to help or any of the other kind of stuff that they might attach to you.
Speaker A:And of course, conversely, this is also true for us because we have to be intentional that when somebody doesn't show up for us the way that we want or the way we think that they should.
Speaker A:We have a responsibility to remember as well and to look back and to say, wait a minute, am I locking them into current scenario or last scenario finality, or am I willing to go, okay, wait a minute, let me back up here and let me look at the big picture.
Speaker A:Let me look back over what has happened over a period of time.
Speaker A:This can also help to identify relationships that are harmful, that do have some destructive patterns going on.
Speaker A:Because when we look back and remember, for example, and we say, you know, that that person has lied now on a number of different occasions, that isn't the same as going back and pulling that up just to be mean and hateful and say, well, that person's a liar and that's all they ever do and that's all they're ever going to do.
Speaker A:But when you have those things, you're able to go back and remember and say, yeah, okay, so there is a pattern of dishonesty here.
Speaker A:Then you are relationally smart to pay attention to that.
Speaker A:So there is tremendous power in intentional remembering, remembering for ourselves and our own growth and our own faith and our own relationship with God and also remembering for other people and remembering about how they have shown up or not so that we can make good decisions for ourselves, for our relationships.
Speaker A:And then in those situations where we need God's direction, we need his provision and we don't approach it like the Israelites did when they were there at the the entrance almost ready to go into Canaan of whining and complaining and basically declaring that God's not going to show up and asking him to, to prove them wrong, but rather coming to him with a sense of anticipation and expectation and humility and willingness to hear from him and follow however he leads.
Speaker A:All right, my friend, in the next few weeks we're going to have a two part interview coming up that I'm very excited to bring to you and a woman that has a course specifically for moms and helping moms to be the best that they can possibly be.
Speaker A:So be looking forward to that.
Speaker A:And then there will be some miniseries on some different topics coming up as well because I do want you as for myself to be spiritually strong, emotionally healthy and relationally smart.
Speaker A:And why?
Speaker A:Because you have an impact that is immeasurable, eternal and irreplaceable.
Speaker A:I'll see you next time.
Speaker B:Thank you for listening.
Speaker B:Visit the website, stay stephaniepresents.com and sign up for High Impact to join the mission of building spiritually strong, emotionally healthy, and relationally smart women and families.
Speaker B:You can also book Stephanie to speak at your event and check out additional resources.
Speaker B:Together we can invite and equip generations to engage fully in God's grand story.
