How our we suppose to remember?

One of the books I am reading by Mirslov Volf makes a profound statement and that is as people, and especially Westerners have a habit of remembering wrongs and making them out to be bigger than what they are. The author also notices that we also like to build memorials to how we were wronged. Whether it is something on a national, community or on personal level, we tend to erect things to help us remember and hold on to bitterness, anger and even helps us to plan out revenge. I think this leads to several dangerous habits and character issues.

The first character issue is that our remembering often makes the situation bigger or smaller than what it really is. How often to we accuse people of doing this and turning mole hills into mountains. One of the things that helps distort this reality is time. As we get farther from the event, our memory tends to get a little fuzzy and we make things out to be better or worse than what they really are. So do we just stop trusting our memories, or recall them with self awareness and integrity to the best of our ability.

The second character issue that could come up is when recalling memories, we often make ourselves one of three things. We either become the vilian, hero, or victim. Each one of these has serious issues when taken to the extreme, but more often than not, we tend to live in the victim or hero mindset. The victim mindset is that we have been wronged and we need to seek revenge. Another aspect of playing the victim card is that we have done nothing to provoke what was done to us, or if we did do something, the retaliation done to us for what we did was out of bounds. It would be like I taking your piece of chocolate and then you giving me a black eye. The victim mind set often makes us better than what we really are. If we play the hero, we tend to come in and either fix problems or try and fix everything and it actually makes things worse. This mind set thinks that we need to be in everyone’s business and that they need us. This is known as a Savior complex and it is not healthy or Godly.

The third character issue that I see is when we start building those memorials for how we were wronged, it can hinder the forgiveness and healing process. It is not that I am against such things as the Pearl Harbor Memorial or things like that, but when we build those type of memorials, it often turns into a us versus them mentality. Doing this can help us hold on to our hurts and hangups without moving on towards forgiveness. It gives us a reason to hold on to bitterness, hatred and it allows us to stay in the past without moving on. Completely forgetting these events is not healthy either. Making events smaller than what they are or forgetting abut them are just as dangerous as making mountains into mole hills because those events will not go away buy themselves and will often lead to some form of addiction or unhealthy attatchment. Here is a side note, time does not heal all wounds, only Jesus can do that. When we experience these things, we can heal, but we wont be the same. We can either wallow in our misery, or find ways where we can put things into their proper context and learn how to take responsibility for and seek forgiveness and give grace and forgiveness to those who both deserve and don’t deserve it in our eyes because thats what Jesus does for us?