He Shall Bring All Things to Your Remembrance

Something has happened to his concentration and he can date it to about eleven months ago.

He was a man who could hold a complicated argument in his head for a week. He taught. He could construct a thing on a Tuesday, carry it about with him, and set it down on a Thursday more or less intact.

Now he reads a paragraph and gets to the end of it having taken in about a third. He starts a sentence out loud and loses the second half of it. He has begun writing things on his hand.

There are reasons. A death, a house move, a period at work that took more out of him than anybody knew, and a level of tiredness that has not lifted since. He is not confused about why it happened.

What has been much harder is what he has concluded about it.

He has concluded that he is currently unable to receive anything. Not disqualified morally. Structurally. In the way that a man with a broken arm is not able to lift a thing, no matter how willing he is.

And here is the sentence he has never said out loud, because it sounds self pitying and he is not a self pitying man.

He has stopped going to God with anything that matters, on the grounds that he would not be able to hold it if it came.

Read whose job the remembering is

There is a promise in John, given the night before everything came apart, to men who were about to prove spectacularly bad at retaining things.

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.John 14:26

He shall bring all things to your remembrance.

Read who is doing the work in that sentence. The teaching is His. The bringing to remembrance is His. There is no clause anywhere in it about the disciples' retention, their alertness, their note taking or the state of their heads.

And consider the timing. He says this to men who are hours away from falling asleep in a garden when asked to stay awake, running in every direction, and forgetting almost everything He has told them about what was coming.

He knows exactly what He is working with. He makes the promise anyway, and He puts the remembering on the Spirit rather than on them.

Your remembering is His work rather than yours, and it was assigned that way from the start. That is what the word actually says, not a mercy I am extending to you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the bringing back in a man who is writing things on his hand.

The broken arm is real and the conclusion is not

Now the honest part, and I want to hold both halves.

The capacity is genuinely reduced. That is not imagination and it is not something to be shamed out of you. Grief and exhaustion do exactly what you're describing, and anybody who tells you to try harder has never been in the eleventh month of it.

And if this has gone on eleven months, it is worth mentioning to a doctor. Not because faith is insufficient, but because a body that is not recovering is a body worth having looked at, and going is what having hands and feet means.

The conclusion is the part that is not true. Unable to receive treats hearing as a function of holding, and the verse puts holding on the other side of the table entirely.

And nothing about a reduced capacity has ever put you outside His reach. Scripture assigns the bringing to remembrance to the Spirit and never once to the strength of a man's memory, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for your concentration to come back.

Stop trying to hold on

Here is the practical piece, and it will feel like giving up on something.

Be with Him without trying to retain anything.

Pick one recurring noisy stretch. Be in it. And when something arrives, do not do what a teacher does, which is immediately begin working out how to keep it. Let it go past. If it matters, the bringing back is somebody else's job and it says so in the verse.

That will feel careless, because you have spent thirty years being the man who does not lose things.

You are able to receive without holding, and the holding was never in your column. He promised that the Spirit brings all things back, and the Holy Spirit is the One who returns a thing to a man eleven months later on a Tuesday.