Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I meditate on your precepts
    and consider your ways.
I delight in your decrees;
    I will not neglect your word.

• Psalm 119:15-16

“Why is it that my thoughts wander so quickly from God’s word, and that in my hour of need the needed word is often not there? Do I forget to eat and drink and sleep? Then why do I forget God’s word? Because I still can’t say what the psalmist says: ‘I will delight in your statutes’ (Ps. 119:16). I don’t forget the things in which I take delight. Forgetting or not forgetting is a matter not of the mind but of the whole person, of the heart. I never forget what body and soul depend upon. The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour. Only love protects against forgetting.
“Because God’s word has spoken to us in history and thus in the past, the remembrance and repetition of what we have learned is a necessary daily exercise. Every day we must turn again to God’s acts of salvation, so that we can again move forward…. Faith and obedience live on remembrance and repetition. Remembrance becomes the power of the present because of the living God who once acted for me and who reminds me of that today.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live These Days with You (devotion for January 14, devotions compiled from his writings)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks if we forget to eat, drink, and sleep. 

I know people who get away with very little sleep, but sleep is one of those things that catches up with you.  Every time that I think of missing sleep, I remember the hippie who sat next to me at a Psychology exam final.  I asked if he was “up” for the test.  His reply worried me.  He said, “I’ve been up for three days, man.”  When I completed the test, I looked at the hippie.  He was asleep with his eyes open.  He had not even written his name on his test paper.  The uppers had worn off at the wrong time.  Either that or his brain was fried.

As for eating, I have known people who get so engrossed in video game playing that they might not eat for three or four days.  They have done that so often that they do not get hungry. 

Drinking on the other hand is hard to forget, but few of us drink enough.  The charts for the color of our urine should tell us that we drink far less than we should – water, not soft drinks or alcohol.  Actually alcohol dehydrates the body.  Your mouth may feel wet at the moment, but the alcohol demands its share of the body’s moisture and the result is an overall dehydration of the body.

But my son has neurological disorders and one symptom is forgetfulness.  He might forget to start cooking a meal before the children get home, but when they arrive, he realizes his error.  Yet, when he was working, he never forgot to set the alarm.  He never forgot to brush his teeth or take a bath.  I usually call him daily.  But when I do not call him for three days, he forgets to call me.

I have known people who might go a week without taking a bath.  In the USA, baths are a daily thing.  When I worked in Germany, I had a French typist who took her bath on Tuesday night.  On Monday, it smelled like she poured an entire bottle of perfume over her body, but on Tuesday, her body odor was so bad that ten bottles of perfume would not help.  I went to the HR manager and simply said, “Tuesday.”  He nodded and said he would have a talk with her.  I did not have to say anything more.  She offended everyone, but with bathing on Sunday night and Tuesday night, she became an exemplary employee.  But that was culture, not forgetfulness.  It is sad when you ask someone when they bathed last, and they cannot remember.

But when is the last time that you prayed?  When is the last time that you attended a worship service?  When is the last time you read a devotion?  When is the last time you read the Bible?

When something is important, like my son brushing his teeth or bathing, you do not forget such things.  Now profound dementia can leave us forgetting a lot.  But with my son’s neurological disorders, there were the important things that he never forgot.

When we say that Jesus is the most important person in our lives, we should never, ever forget Him in our daily walk.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.