I Forgot to Remember

This week I found out I need a different kind of infusion for another health issue. It is not related to cancer, thankfully, but the word infusion still lands on me like a stone. Two years ago I sat through six months of chemotherapy. I remember the hours of stillness, needle in arm, watching clear liquid drip slowly into my body. I thought those days were behind me. I left the appointment carrying a weight I hadn’t expected, a dread I recognized but didn’t want to name.

The next day, over coffee, a friend told me about a speaker she had heard recently. The message was simple: God wants us to remember what He has done in our lives. My friend had already been doing this. She had been quietly collecting moments from her past, specific times when she had seen and felt the faithfulness of God, and she was thinking about painting each one on a tiny canvas. Her plan was to join them all together into a wall hanging. A gallery of remembrance. Something she could look at on the hard days.

I felt tears rise before she finished speaking. I thought about her little canvases all the way home. She wasn’t the first person to think this way — not by a few thousand years. Just that week, I read a story in Scripture about a man who knew something about hard days. In 1 Samuel 30, David returns to his city of Ziklag to find it burned and emptied. The Amalekites had raided while he was away, taking every woman and child, leaving nothing but ash and silence. The text says that David and his men wept until they had no strength left to weep. And then, in one of the quietest and most striking phrases in all of the Old Testament, it simply says: David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.

The passage doesn’t explain how. It doesn’t give us a formula. But I have always imagined that somewhere in that stillness, when tears were drying on his face, David began to remember. Perhaps he thought of the valley where, as a young shepherd, he had stood before a giant with nothing but a stone and the name of God. That day should have ended him. It didn’t. Perhaps the memory of that morning was enough to make him believe that this day, too, was held by the same hands.

Memory gave him a foothold. And from that steadier place, he had the strength to ask God: Shall I pursue? Will You help me recover what has been lost?

And God answered: Go. You will recover it all.

I opened my journal and began to write down ways I had seen God’s faithfulness in my life. Maybe this would calm my fears about the appointment. I started writing slowly, the way you do when you’re not sure what you’ll find. But the pen kept moving. There were the large, luminous moments, like the healing of our daughter’s leukemia when she was ten years old, a grandchild delivered safely through a frightening birth, my own body continuing to mend after cancer. These were the Goliath moments, the ones I should never have forgotten.

But then came the smaller things, rising up like quiet witnesses. The hummingbirds that returned to the feeder this week, drinking nourishment. The friend who showed up at exactly the right time with exactly the right words. The morning I woke up afraid and somehow, by afternoon, was not.

I wrote down twenty things, then thirty, then stopped at fifty only because my hand was tired, not because I had run out.

Sitting with that list, I noticed a change in my body. My shoulders started to relax. I felt the tension in my face loosen. It was not dramatic, not sudden, but real. The dread of the next infusion was still there, but it had grown smaller. Or perhaps my view of God had grown larger.

Faith, I think, is not always about looking forward. Sometimes it is the act of turning around, like standing in the present moment and looking back at all the ground God has already carried you across. The stones He has already helped you sling. The fires He has already walked you through.

If He has been faithful in all of those moments, both the enormous ones and the quiet ones, the ones I recorded and the ones I surely forgot, why would He stop now?

I closed the journal. Outside, a hummingbird returned to the feeder. I watched it drink.