So much of the way we live our story now, I think, depends on our ability to remember what has already happened and lately I've been working on the discipline of memory.  Lately I've been paying dues to what has already been done and where He has already brought me.  It means reading the Testaments, rooting into our history as His people.  Reviewing the wandering, the redeeming, the straying again.  It has me listening to my mother tell the stories of her and my father and how they were dirt poor in the beginning.  Of how she fought the roaches in her apartment and how they ate pizza from the restaurant she worked at every night because money was tight and dad was still in school.  It's holding my breath when grandpa starts telling stories and hoping inside that he won't stop.

Remembering has taken over my prayers, too.  Every Sunday I pray over the brother I miss, pray over the Spirit in him that I have not seen for so long.  Every Sunday I remember the fire he was, the way the Spirit was loud in him, the struggle he has always carried-- that tension found when darkness starts to mix into the light.  Lately I have felt sure of this: it is time.  He is calling him out.  It is time to wake up, you have been asleep for so long.  And every Sunday I let him know.  I carried you to The Father today.  And I really miss those faded parts of you.

Just last weekend I was telling the story of husband and me and it hit me again, There is power here.  There is power in taking your past and saying it out loud, in naming the good and the way He moved light into dark spaces and I think when we take the time to call out our story, to give a voice to the light parts and to hush the dark, then maybe we are staking claim in the future, too.  Maybe we are girding ourselves for whatever is coming that might try to steal away our image, blur the path, whisper sweet lies from a tree in a garden full of good things.