There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality,” wrote John Keats in a letter to J. H. Reynolds. It was a similar impression that hundreds of attendees had as they left the Hyatt Regency Cincinnati after four days of “heaven on earth.” The ministry at Mission93, convened by CMML, drew our minds to Christ; the singing drew our hearts to glory; the fellowship drew our souls to one another. Some of us almost wished we didn’t have to leave.
But we did leave. Most of us are not in Cincinnati now. We’re in Wichita and Vancouver and Colorado Springs and Augusta and Timmins and a hundred other cities and towns across the continent. I hope we haven’t got over it. This issue of Uplook is to help you so you don’t. And if you weren’t able to make it to the conference, this should give you a taste.
The human race has an amazing faculty to anticipate the future and recall the past, giving a zestful flavoring to the present. In fact, we have four taste buds of the soul. I suggest they are memory, conscience, discernment, and imagination. With these internal senses, we “taste” experiences and then may “season” to our liking, or leave out certain ingredients we find distasteful.
Memory is the power to selectively call to mind a portion of what has been retained in the brain. It is perhaps more remarkable what we do not remember at any given time. One would be driven to madness if, for example, when the word “Mother” was brought to our attention, we suddenly recalled every association we ever had with mothers. It is this ability to instantaneously filter out what is not relevant that astounds me.
Of course, memory does not only draw on mere facts; it is a multi-media resource. The sight of a long-ago loved one’s smile, or the sounds of a summer evening in our childhood–crickets playing their violins, a screen door slamming, a car accelerating into the night. I remember the smells of the Sunday roast, my grandmother’s peonies, the watered soil after spring planting. But stored away, awaiting recall, are emotions, sensory feelings, and impressions as well.
I can vividly see on the screen of my mind a frozen frame of life from more than twenty years ago. Returning from a meeting on a Lord’s Day, I was passing through Spring Lake, a picturesque town just west of Grand Rapids. Suddenly the afternoon stillness was torn in two with the ragged wail of an approaching ambulance. I pulled to the curb.
The emergency vehicle hurtled past. Immediately behind was a blue 50’s Chevy pickup. Hunched over the wheel, jaw taut, was a young man. Leaning into his shoulder, a weeping woman. It is still as stark as a Rockwell painting in my mind.
I could only imagine the young child, object of the couple’s devotion, in the ambulance that day. I do not know the end of the story. But what I wonder is why I have this snippet from someone else’s life story in my memory file. What is it doing there?
However, memory is not the only one doing filing in the storeroom of my mind. There is conscience. Conscience works through the documents on its own time, often in the dead of night. Conscience, unlike memory, does not ask, Where is the file? but, What is it doing here? There are no closed cases for this watchman of the soul, no statute of limitations. And conscience has an amazing memory of its own.
Discernment asks another question: Is it worthwhile? Is there something better? Although the life has phenomenal storage capabilities, they are limited. I do not have time, energy, nor resources for everything. Discernment assesses the data to discard from the life what is less than the best (see Phil. 1:10).
Imagination, or vision if you wish, considers what is and asks what might be. It is evidently a faculty given by God, but often commandeered by the devil (Gen. 6:5). Yet it is essential to life and growth. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Vision knows we live in a marred world but sees beyond to a mighty God.
So having feasted on the good things of God (especially as presented at Cincinnati), and sipped them again in our memories, what are we going to do now?
I remember standing beside a brother, waiting for a conference to begin. A young man, who looked like he had dressed on the way, rushed in and breathlessly asked my friend, “When does the service start?”
“Just as soon as the conference is over.”