Remembrance

What is remembrance?

Remembrance is the spiritual practice of consistently reviewing and internalizing the things God speaks to me such that they inform how I live each day.

Rememberance is an active response to the teaching, revelations, and testimonies that God puts in my life. Memory becomes a choice instead of being left to chance.¹

Remembrance phases

1. Capture: recognize and log moments God speaks to me
2. Reflection: identify what I want to remember from what I’ve captured
3. Recall: regularly prompt myself to develop memory
4. Formation: express what I’ve remembered in my daily life

Having a full picture of Remembrance influences how I practice each phase. Examples –

• The end goal of Formation in daily life informs what I discern to be meaningful during Reflection.
• My method of Recall informs the format I codify insights during Reflection and log moments during Capture.
• Gaps in knowledge exposed during Reflection inform things to be more aware of during Capture.
• Capturing sensory artifacts like images or audio clips can be used as mnemonic mediums during Recall.

Practicing Remembrance

• Memory systems as a ways to practice Remembrance

Anti-patterns in Remembrance

• Offloading memories into digital vaults
  • Offloading leads to brittle spiritual formation, as things I store digitally do not reliably affect my day-to-day behavior.
  • Digital vaults are great at holding an unlimited amount of stuff and organizing that stuff into neat bins. However, digital vaults are far from my subconscious. If my brain is RAM, a digital vault is like glacial storage.
• Completionism - trying to remember everything that I am exposed to
  • There is too much new Chrstian content in the modern age. Reflection and Capture need to filter what is most pertinent to remember.
  • Completionism drains energy during Reflection and Capture, generating unnecessary pressure to capture every possible detail. This energy could have been put into more focused reflection or more time spent in Recall.