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In this post, we are considering our hearts and how quick we are prone to wander from the God that we love. As we create our goals and dreams, we often desire to put God in the center of them, but all too quickly life gets in the way and we forget our story, our priorities, and our God. In this post, we talk about the importance of dealing with forgetting by remembering and retelling our story, which is the story of God’s faithfulness in our lives.

This is Season 1 Episode 28 of the Podcast. Be sure to rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts to help others find the show!

S1E40 – What is Theology Proper?: 3 Questions to Help You Know God Better – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

We have to start our study of theology by looking at Theology Proper. This is the study of who God is, what God is like, and what God’s nature is. As we look at theology proper, we are focusing primarily on how knowing God more leads to (1) worship and (2) a deeper love. Our study of God should inspire us to know and love God more and more. This podcast will dive into 3 questions that will help you to know God better to start your study of Theology Proper. The Deuteronomy 34 passage is actually EXODUS* 34:5-7. Sorry! View the full post here. Get the Doctrine and Theology Cheat Sheet Here. Get a list of the names of God here. Get a copy of our personal statement of faith creation guide here. Get “Building Our Foundations: 10 Week Study” here. . Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: Read the full post here. I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Prone to Wander

One of my favorite old hymns is “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” written by Richard Robinson in 1758.

The first verse goes like this:

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,

tune my heart to sing thy grace;

streams of mercy, never ceasing,

call for songs of loudest praise.

Teach me some melodious sonnet,

sung by flaming tongues above.

Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,

mount of thy redeeming love.
~ Richard Robinson, “Come Thou Fount” (1758)

Here is a little history behind the hymn. “A favorite line in the last stanza, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love,” is thought to be particularly autobiographical, referring to Robinson’s early life, when his mother sent him to London to be an apprentice. It was during this time, according to hymnologist Kenneth Osbeck, that “he associated with a notorious gang of hoodlums and lived a debauched life” until he came under the spell of Whitefield.” (From Discipleship Ministries)

Prone to Wander.

How often have we been prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love?

This past month we’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions, goals, themes, aspirations, and all things related to productivity. One of the ideas that I keep coming back to when I consider these topics is the sticking power of our goals.

Sticking Power refers to the ability to remember your goals and thus reorient your life around them.

Simple right? Remembering requires seemingly nothing from us, no fancy gadgets, big budgets, or even really a large amount of time.

However, we are a people that so easily forgets.

At the beginning of the year, a common New Year’s Resolution is read through the Bible in a Year. If you get through the slog of Leviticus, you find a story repeated again and again (in fact you start to read a little about it even in the first few pages of scripture). God has given us commands and calls us to obedience. We know the truth. But, then, life happens. We are pulled away by the worries and cares of this world to worship idols we have fashioned with our own hands.

When we forget our goals, our purpose, and who we are in God, we often are prone to wander – seeking fulfillment from our idols and wondering why we can’t get it.

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We are prone to wander because we are prone to forget.

I’ve often wondered why we seem so prone to wander, prone to forgetting. Perhaps sin has wired us to be led astray, and I think that is partially true. We are distracted by the sin that so easily entangles, and so we don’t press on fully in the direction of our goals and dreams.

But, what if there is more to the story than that?

In Science Daily, Dr Ryan, whose research team is based in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI), said:

“Memories are stored in ensembles of neurons called ‘engram cells’ and successful recall of these memories involves the reactivation of these ensembles. The logical extension of this is that forgetting occurs when engram cells cannot be reactivated. The memories themselves are still there, but if the specific ensembles cannot be activated they can’t be recalled. It’s as if the memories are stored in a safe but you can’t remember the code to unlock it.

“Our new theory proposes that forgetting is due to circuit remodeling that switches engram cells from an accessible to an inaccessible state. Because the rate of forgetting is impacted by environmental conditions, we propose that forgetting is actually a form of learning that alters memory accessibility in line with the environment and how predictable it is.”

This research shows that forgetting is a symptom of our adaptability. I’m always impressed by how easily my son is able to adapt to new situations and experiences. He does remember what happened in the past, but he is able to move on and embrace the new. Embracing the new means that he often has to leave the old behind, whether that’s an old toy, an old friend, or a one-time event. It’s just part of growing up; you are continually saying goodbye to your old life as you mature into a new one.

Forgetting in this way eases the pain of goodbyes and reinforces the new learning. More than that, forgetting allows for a certain corrective influence of stories on our lives. As we move on to new experiences, we can retell the story of the past to ourselves, highlighting the good, true, and beautiful. Forgetting requires this form of retelling, and as the research shows, as we retell – or remember – the past, we are slightly altering that memory, making it clearer and making it stronger.

Perhaps forgetting is wired into us because of sin; I believe that is what most of us believe. But, what if forgetting is something that God intended before the curse? (Or he has at least redeemed after it was introduced with sin?) Because we forget, we must be intentional with the practice of remembering. If we are not intentional, we are prone to wander. But, if we are intentional, we routinely remember God and his work in our lives. Forgetting requires us to remember, and by remembering, we place God in his rightful place in our lives.

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Images do not help us remember. We are still prone to wander.

I’m not sure if forgetting is a symptom of the curse or if it is just how God designed us to navigate the world. I wonder if our answer is different with the advent of pictures and cameras. With pictures, we can capture any moment at any time. We feel like we should be like our phones, able to remember any moment we wish to capture instantly. We feel like it is our own failing that we have forgotten.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author, Neil Postman, talks about the idea of capturing images. Postman believes that images have ‘become king’ over the print and written word, which leads to a culture that is solely built on entertainment and not much else.

In the book, he considers the 10 commandments, particularly the second commandment, “Thou shalt not make a graven image unto thee.” I always took this to mean that we should not create an idol to worship, but Postman argues differently. What if this means we shouldn’t make any images because God knows of our propensity to worship the image? That we are an intensely image-drawn people. The image makes us prone to wander and prone to worship the graven images we make.

Postman published his book in the 80’s, and obviously, the world has changed tremendously since then. In many ways, his book was prophetic, as pictures have become even more ubiquitous and selfies are our new mode of worship. (My son even has a toy that sings a song about taking a selfie. We are indoctrinating them into the religion of the worship of self-image early.)

Of course, there were paintings in the past, though paints could be expensive and hard to get, but our ability to capture images of people was fairly difficult. Most paintings functioned more like memories, where you told the story of the person rather than capturing them exactly as they are. Are we meant to have access to all of these decontextualized photos? What does this do to our sense of time and our sense of memory and forgetting?

Some days, I’m drawn by my phone, and I start scrolling through old pictures. There is a common saying that says, “Time is a thief.” And, I feel that deeply as I look at the newborn and baby-faced versions of my son and daughter. Our past is now told through pictures (and will be told through video as our children get older). It seems like it makes remembering obsolete. Because we are able to see photos that could show us as we were at any moment of our lives, we feel like we should remember who we are at that moment. We use the photos to tell our story rather than our words. We feel like we should be like our computers or our phones or our Facebook feed – able to call up any moment at any time with perfect ‘memory.’

But, I think this is a mistake.

Remembering means retelling the Story

When we tell our past as a story, we are creating meaning out of it. We are using it to explain who we are based on who we come from. Time has a way of refining and reinforcing lasting truths and ideas. Over time, we pick out the most important moments of our lives and include those in our story, whether or not we’ve documented them with a photo.

When we tell our past through photos, we are looking at single moments in time as a puzzle. We are trying to remember what we were doing then, who we were with. We attach importance to those moments and those people. And, crucially, we have a sense of loss – maybe for the person we were (and how skinny we were back then), for the people we were with and have lost, for the different life we were living.

Remembering is meant to help us learn new life experiences through the refinement of time. We remember and then retell a story that helps us to make sense of the world. Through remembering we draw our hearts – so easily prone to wander – back to the living God.

If I were to ask you how God has been faithful to you, most of you would begin by telling me a story. If the faithfulness involves a tangible thing – like a house or a child – you might show me a picture. But, all of you would explain in words the story of the past.

The Bible is written as a story. More than that, it is written as a story that repeats itself over and over again. It is the story of a people who were lost, a God who seeks, and a reuniting of a God and his people. Only for the people to forget again and wander away. They were so easily prone to wander, prone to leave the God they loved.

In our image-based society, are we so prone to wander because we are forgetting? Are we forgetting because we have stopped retelling the story? Have we stopped retelling the story because we rely on images to make sense of who we are rather than words?

I would argue yes to all of the above. Because of technology, we think we can remember it all. But, truly, we are more forgetful now because we don’t value the retelling. We don’t feel like we have to.

In ancient cultures, the storytellers (or the scribes, the priests, the teachers) of the village were always held in high esteem because they held the knowledge. They would have to pass the knowledge down to the next generation or it would be lost. There were no backup disks or old books lying around. Definitely, no internet or AI to give you the information. So, the knowledge was framed as a story and retold again and again. Mothers passed down information to children. The Bible commands parents to teach their children at every moment by talking about the law of God with them. A retelling of the story.

We feel like we have information at our fingertips, so we don’t retell. We don’t try to remember. Because our phones do the remembering for us.

But, AI, google, and the internet don’t create meaning for us. They may spew information at us, but they don’t – or shouldn’t – teach us how to rightly live. We create meaning for ourselves, our children, and our communities when we remember the past and retell it.

How do we stay with the God we love despite a heart that is prone to wander?

We want to stay with God and work against the effects of forgetting. With the power of the Holy Spirit, we practice a daily remembering of who and whose we are. This is remembering how we are sanctified. It’s how we become more like Christ. Though forgetting can be evil and can make us prone to wander, in remembering we reinforce and strengthen our relationship with God. Through remembering, we are made perfect, or more mature and complete, in Christ.

So, how do we remember?

First, we must tell our story to ourselves.

I’ve been talking about this idea of retelling a story, but what do I actually mean by that? To retell the story means to get down to the central truths of your life: Who are you? Whose are you? What is your purpose? How has God been faithful to you? How do you hope he will be faithful to you in the future? What groups are you a part of? What does it mean to be a part of those groups? (For me, what does it mean to be a Fletcher? To be a member of my church? To be a Christian?) What is the story of your ancestors? What is my character? How do I live my character out day by day?

These questions are complex, and yet, often they are easy enough to retell after you’ve thought about them. Retelling your story means you think about those questions, and then, you tell them to yourself, and your family, often. The story becomes a sort of mantra for how you should live.

In the great parenting book, Hunt, Gather, Parent, the author describes how certain cultures practice this form of retelling. The children in those cultures are less anxious because they know where they’ve come from. They know their story which means they know their place in the world.

If you’ve been following along on the blog, many of the recommendations I give for planning begin by reviewing your year and setting a vision that diffuses into all sorts of different goals and areas of your life. Figuring out your story requires initial work – just like reviewing your year requires work – but it will help you to remember that story easily when you need it most when your heart starts to wander.

Second, we must work in times of regular retelling to our schedules.

In my post on Seeking the Kingdom of God every day, I talked about those moments in the year that give us glimpses of the future kingdom. Camps, vacations, and holidays can give us a glimpse of that feeling of togetherness and God-focused purpose.

We need a break from the day-to-day cares of the world to realign our focus on God’s kingdom. By working in rhythms to our daily, weekly, and yearly schedule, we can intentionally choose to practice a regular retelling of our story to work against the forgetting. The schedules and rhythms of God were created in the beginning with the giving of the law built in this daily, weekly, and yearly ritual of retelling through the sabbath and feasts.

Despite the press of daily responsibilities, we pull away and sacrifice our time remembering God and what he has done for us. In modern times, this looks like daily quiet times, weekly church meetings, and yearly pauses through holidays and other traditions. These aren’t just nice things to do. These individual and communal practices are vital to our faith.

Third, we must document God’s faithfulness in our lives by constantly adding to and revising our stories.

When we first begin to untangle the threads of our story and weave it into a narrative, we may find ourselves working through certain portions of our lives, certain beliefs about God, and certain painful moments we’ve endured. Through the process of remembering, we are learning what it means to be a Christian – a Christ one, or someone who is in Christ. At the beginning of this sanctification process, this means we will necessarily wrestle with some truths about God and about ourselves, as we submit to God’s law in our lives.

This wrestling does not end with maturity; it just changes. Things that used to be difficult become easy, but new struggles arise. We learn how to navigate these difficulties as we continue to trust God more and more.

As we write the story of our lives, we begin to recognize what is important and what is now. We start to consider events through the lens of eternity. Certain cares and worries that make us prone to wander are let go and forgotten as we continue to make God the first priority in our daily lives.

Ultimately, our story is our legacy that we pass on when we die. We want the revisions and additions to our story to be something that is worthwhile, something that adds to our legacy.

We don’t want our story to be defined by a heart that is prone to wander.

So, let’s pause, remember, and retell the story again.

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