Remember for What is Ahead

How long has the lockdown been? We’re around week ten now depending on how you count. For the people in the book of Deuteronomy it had been forty years. A desert journey that was supposed to take a few weeks took instead (due to their own failings) four decades.  The desert was a place of scarcity. The land that they were about to enter was a place of “vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey”.  

The book of Deuteronomy is basically the leader of the people, Moses, giving them some important instruction before they entered the land. The instruction could be summed up with one word, “Remember”. 

Remember that God provided for you in the desert. 
Remember that wealth and blessing does not come from your own hand. 
Remember other people who have less than you. 
Don’t hoard up for yourselves.  

It might be too early to tell if our count will be in weeks or months or years. How long will the pandemic time of 2019,2020 (2021, 2022?) be remembered to have lasted years from now? However long it will be, we can start the process of remembering now. 

We were worried; but we had enough. 
We were unsure about our health and many suffered loss, but we got through. 
We knew God’s goodness, even in the midst of uncertainty and sorrow. 
In many cases we saw people come together to face the time of difficulty. 

Will we count, after this is all done, that occasion was taken to make some things better? 
Did we learn to deal with some of the staggering inequality in our society? 
Did we change the way that we commute?
Did we change our health care system?  
Might we look back, after all of this, and count how we revamped long term health care? 

Remember. The people ready to cross the river into the land of promise were told to remember so that they might live lives of gratitude and blessing rather than lives of fear and hoarding. It is curious that we feel inspired and made alive by stories of gratitude and blessing, but we so often fall to fear and hoarding as the things that we think will keep us alive.  

Dear God; Thank you for your provision. Thank you for blessing us with one another. Make us determined to remember. We want to remember your goodness. We want to remember those around us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.