If Memory Serves Me Right...

There was a day last week when the outside thermometer read -12°. All day long. So long, in fact, I believed the thermometer had broken in the cold. When I got up the next morning, it read -4°, so I knew it was still working, but that it was, indeed, very cold out. No records were broken, though, for lowest temperature, or for longest cold streak, or for lowest highs. Yet I had only to turn on the news or pick up a paper to be drawn into the hype of the cold spell and think it had never been this cold in the Midwest in January. Why do we become so obsessed with an infrequent, yet not rare, meteorological event? Because we have such short memories...

I recently read a book I found very entertaining for just this reason. Some of the subjects of this non-fiction piece were a famous celebrity who had to fight off mobs of media wherever he went; an exceptional athlete who had a substance abuse problem and a voracious sexual appetite; a president who accomplished very little as president, loved taking vacations and was shrouded by whispers of sexual scandal; a group of financial wizards whose greed brings down Wall Street; terrorist attacks on American soil. The book also contained stories of bad decisions in the auto industry, this country's obsession with the motion picture industry, and historic Mississippi River flooding. The book? - One Summer – 1927 by Bill Bryson. The players? - Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, anarchists Sacco and Venzetti, Henry Ford...

The book is a very informative picture of the summer of 1927 in America, told in the entertaining manner that Bill Bryson brings to all his writing. And I did enjoy it for its information and humor, but what I really loved about the book was this unintentional and oddly comforting reminder - there is nothing – NOTHING - new under the sun!

I think we all have a tendency to look around ourselves and believe all we know in our immediate surroundings – the government, the economy, natural disasters, crime, media manipulation, even people and the temperature – are growing worse than “ever before”. The truth is, we just don't remember the “ever before”. Solomon, writing in the book of Ecclesiastes, nailed it with this good reminder:

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. (Ecclesiastes 1:9,10)

We forget what we, as human beings living in this glorious, yet fallen world, are capable of, both the good and the bad. We forget the eternal now of the One who created and redeemed us and this glorious world, the One Who sees the summer of 1927 and the January of 2014 in one glance and is neither surprised nor overwhelmed by anything that He observes, neither the cold temperature or the outrageous behavior of us human beings. We need to be reminded that the everlasting Father is unchanging, but we and this world, like the old ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle claimed, stay the same but keep changing. We just forget over time our sameness in the midst of our perceived changes. We can take both comfort and hope in the fact the eternal God remembers who we are even if we don't. We can trust Him with the past, the future and even the “ever before”...

Tomorrow is another day only up to a point. - Annie Dillard