Why God Keeps Asking Us to Remember

My mom asked me for two things in her last days. A cup of coffee. And a bowl of farina, that warm oatmeal she used to make when I was a kid.

She had stopped eating and drinking by then. Most days she barely had the strength for a sip of water. But that morning, she lifted that cup of coffee and drank every last drop, slowly, as if it were the best cup she'd ever tasted. Then she ate the farina the same way, slowly savoring every bite, looking up at me with so much gratitude in her eyes. I sat next to her with my own coffee and my own bowl, and we just sat there. Smiling. Laughing softly. Not needing to say much of anything.

Nothing about that moment was big. No dramatic goodbye, no big speech. Just two people, quietly loving each other over coffee and oatmeal, right before she passed away. I will never forget it.

I've been thinking about that morning a lot lately, because the word remember has been sitting on my heart.

Some of you might hear that word and brace yourselves. Remembering can feel dangerous if the only things waiting for you back there are the hard ones. I get that. But lately, remembering has felt more like a gift to me than a burden, because of everything I got to witness in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of my life.

There's a moment in the Bible where God tells Joshua to have the priests go back and gather stones, then stack them up as a memorial. God knew His people would forget. They would forget the miracles, the rescue, the faithfulness they had witnessed. So He told Joshua to build something they couldn't ignore. I think about that a lot. We forget so easily, even the moments that carried real weight, so maybe we need memorials, even small ones, just to remember what we're prone to forget.

Memorials remind us what God has done. But remembering isn't only about looking backward. Sometimes remembering shapes who we become.

I read something that echoed this in my devotional not long ago. It walked through Nehemiah's story, how his heart broke when he heard about the state of Jerusalem, a heartbreak he couldn't just remember his way out of, he had to sit in it. And then, in the middle of that grief, he prayed something so simple. "Remember me, O my God, for good." (Nehemiah 13:14) Not just remember what God had done. Remember him. Let his life count for something good.

Reading that stopped me. So I sat with a few questions, and I want to invite you to sit with them too.

1. What breaks your heart? What's the situation, in your family, your community, the world, that you can't stop grieving over?
2. What do you remember? Where has God actually shown up in that exact kind of pain before?
3. And what do you want to be remembered for?

When I asked myself the first question, I didn't have to think very long. What breaks my heart is people feeling forgotten. Unseen. That's actually the whole reason I wrote Planting in the Dark. I wanted people in dark seasons to feel like someone finally saw them.

When I asked the second, I thought of all the quiet ways God has shown up for me. Small windows. Glimpses I almost missed because I was moving too fast to notice them.

And the third one, the legacy question, that's the one that stayed with me longest. I actually went back to my journal and found a whole list I'd written out over time, but a few of them kept rising to the top. That people felt safe around me, like they could trust me with the real stuff. That I wasn't afraid of the hard seasons, because I knew God was with me in them. And underneath all of it, that I loved deeply. My family, my God, and the people around me, generously and without holding back.

All of this started with a cup of coffee and a bowl of farina.

That's the thing about remembering. It doesn't have to be dark. Sometimes it's the very thing that shows you what's next, but only if you're willing to look back first and notice where God already showed up. Not in the big, obvious moments, but in the ordinary ones. A shared meal. A quiet room. Right in the middle of the mess, He was already there, and He still is.

So if you sat with those same three questions, what breaks your heart, what you remember, and what you want to be remembered for, I don't think you'd end up with just a page full of answers. I think you'd end up with a map. Because the things that break our hearts and the places we've already seen God be faithful are usually pointing toward the same door. Maybe that's why God asks us to remember. The places where He has already been faithful often become the compass for where He's leading us next.

My compass began with a cup of coffee and a bowl of farina. Yours may begin with something just as ordinary. Don't overlook it.

Some of God's greatest invitations arrive disguised as ordinary moments we'll only understand once we choose to remember.

What ordinary moment has become a memorial of God's faithfulness in your life