Precious Memories of a Blessed Past

Like many of my readers, I am well-past retirement age, but still working. One of my “jobs” is serving as Interim Pastor of a church not far from my home in Fort Worth, Texas.  On a recent Sunday I used a sermon illustration that related to my baseball playing days at Reagan High School in Houston. Following the service, a lady came up to me and admitted she too attended Reagan.  As the discussion continued, we discovered that we attended together.  Of course, it was a large school, and our class alone was composed of more than seven hundred students, so we did not know each other back in the day.   In another church I discovered a distant cousin, and in still another, a friend from my teen-age years who lived a couple of blocks from me. In each case, while we had little-to-no remembrance of each other back then, we remembered many of the same things.  All of this proving that while your past deeds may disappear from your memory, there are those around who can remind you of them. Memory, whether yours or that of someone from your past, is a precious gift from God. It was one of my Grandfather’s favorite songs, and I remember him playing it on his banjo and singing it to me: “As I travel on life’s pathway, know not what the years may hold; as I ponder, hope grows fonder, precious mem’ries flood my soul.” Indeed, “the memory of the righteous is blessed” (Proverbs 10:7).