The Lost Art of Remembering

I love trips home.  Recently we had Easter break from school, an entire week off, and I was able to make a trip home.  Aside from visiting old friends and all the traveling I did, one of my most favorite activities was getting to sit on the back porch of my parents’ house.  You see, we live far away from the noise of the city; in fact, if you were to spend the entire day home you would be lucky to see more than 20 cars. To many this sounds absolutely dreadful, but the thing that I like most about being home is the quiet.  After dinner on Saturday night, my father made a pot of coffee, and we were able to sit on the back porch, in the quiet, and drink a good cup of joe. I know that for me, my best thinking is done when it is just quiet.

This night in particular I began to think of two different activities that are seemingly lost in most people today: reflection and introspection.  I know that I rarely take the opportunity to practice these, and it should be done more often.  Before I go on, I would like to clarify what it is that I mean by reflection and introspection.  Reflection does not mean remembering; although these two go hand in hand with each other, they are different activities. To remember would be to conjure up in your mind past events that have taken place in your life, but that would be as far as that would go.  To reflect upon yourself would be to carefully consider who you are by looking upon your physical and mental states of the past.  Introspection is the idea of examining oneself inwardly and really being honest with what one sees, truly understanding who you are right now in this moment.  Most people neglect both of these activities today, and we are in desperate need for a return to them.

There are many reasons why these activities have escaped from people today, but two are most likely the main causes. The first is the inability to escape people today, and the second is the idea of immediacy.  The sophistication of technology today is almost frustrating.  With the ability that cell phones now have to receive text messages, emails, and even check whichever social network is the craze at the moment; we have ensured the fact that we cannot escape.  No matter where you are in the world today (excluding most third world countries) you are accessible to anyone and everyone at all times. The idea of inescapability is daunting.  The only way to really be able to escape communication with everyone would be to power off all our devices and leave them off.  This idea is unheard of; for most people, the idea of turning off the power to their Iphones or Blackberries seems ludicrous.  Even if we were able to turn the phone off, just knowing that people were still sending emails and texts that we are not receiving is enough to keep us from being at ease.  Let us not forget that the way the world operates now, people know that you have immediate access to their messages and expect a prompt response.  People begin to get upset when they are not responded to and may begin to feel that they are being ignored because you have not responded to them in 30 minutes.  People today have far too much to say. If you look at any social network site today, it is filled with people’s ramblings, ninety-eight percent of which have no importance to anyone else other than themselves.  Yet people feel the need to put every thought that they have on the World Wide Web for everyone in the world to be able to see, all the while not realizing that in the future this may hurt them.  Just think about it: anyone you ever meet in the future, for any job interview you later have, will have the ability to see anything you have EVER written!  Just this fact alone should force people to think more about what they say before it is said.  It is almost impossible today to be able to get away from people and be able to get alone.

The idea of the immediacy was described a little bit while talking about technology.  The American culture today is all about the immediate.  We are more concerned with the ability to receive things as fast as possible.  Why is it that the fast food industry has been so prominent in America? Rather than go home and make for ourselves a healthy meal, we like to buy the fact that we can get our food in five minutes rather than one hour (who cares what it does to our bodies).  For so long the idea of immediacy has controlled our lives that it has also began to control the way we think.  For most young people today the inability to think beyond the here and now has made us short sighted.  We can no longer think about the future, in dreams and plans, because of this immediacy mindset.  This has been detrimental for reflection and introspection of the individual.  Being so focused on the present we have forgotten to look back and even more, we have forgotten to look forward until later on in life when we begin to wonder why we waited so long to begin to think about such matters.

Both of these activities are important for every person to do, but even more so for the Christian.  A big part of the Christian walk is growing in Christ, a process known as sanctification.  The question is, how is it possible to see how we are growing if we never reflect upon on ourselves in the past?  I got this opportunity when I was home, on the back porch, in the quiet.  I thought back upon myself when I first began to pursue a degree in ministry, August of 2007.  It is now April of 2011 and I can honestly say that this was the first time that I really sat back and reflected on my walk.  I can tell you that there are many ways that I have changed, things that I am proud of, but there are also things that looking back on I realize, I was doing better.  If the process of sanctification is for the purpose of godliness and to become more Christ-like, I need to be able to measure that growth in order to make sure that I am growing in the right ways.  This will only be done through reflection. 

The activity of introspection goes along with the idea of reflection.  How can one carefully consider themselves and where they are right now if they do not know where they have come from?  Introspection should also lead us beyond just considering ourselves now but looking to the future to see what kind of person it is I wish to become. After seeing the areas that I am doing better in my walk and the things I am doing worse, I am now able to take an accurate look at myself and see which areas in my life that it is I wish to improve upon. Doing this should lead us to make a projection of ourselves in the future where we are able to see the person we will become in time, if we continue in the same path.  A good friend of mine, Dr. Alvin Reid, once said, “You will never drift into holiness, godliness, or into praying more. You will drift into apathy, laziness and into being unhealthy.” The reality is that many people today do not think this way.  We know what kind of person it is that we wish to be in five years, but instead of making a plan to get there, we assume that it will just happen.  This is exactly how people spend five years of their life and realize they are no closer to becoming the person that they wish to be. Christianity is a walk that is made up of concentrated efforts to pursue the things of God and flee from sin.

Take some time in the near future and get alone.  Turn off your phone; don’t worry, those emails can wait; grab your favorite drink; and sit in the quiet.  Use that time to reflect on the person that you used to be and the person you are now.  Do you like where you are? Are you growing? Have you gone backwards from where you would like to be? You might find some ugly truths about yourself, but who knows, maybe you will be pleasantly surprised with where you are and how you are growing.  No matter where you are at though we must realize that we are nowhere near being finished in our growth process.  After reflecting on your past, use introspection to see where it is that you wish to be in the future and what things must you change right now in your life in order to get there.  John Piper wrote a book entitled Don’t Waste Your Life, the purpose being how to live a life that in the end was not wasted on vanity.   Begin these two activities of reflection and introspection so that you do not find yourself in a place in life where you look back and see that years have been wasted. Use these to grow and become the person it is that you wish to be. My prayer is that you never look back at a point of time in your life and feel that it was time wasted.