Water laps against the side of the boat, nudging it gently back and forth. I look down at my 6-year-old son cradled in my arms. A beach towel stretches across his tiny frame, dwarfed by the life jacket clipped around him. Every so often, he lifts his head and flashes a gap-toothed smile, before sinking himself further into my body. I press in closer and feel like I must hold this moment in time—this moment when his body fits inside my entire arm, when he’d rather nestle close than play in the water.
Time is fleeting, or so I’ve heard from the woman at the checkout line. I can’t remember which store or which woman because there’ve been too many to count. The adage suffocates the air we all breathe. College students hear the call not to waste their youth; the newly married couple is told, “These are some of your best years”; even the empty nesters feel the pull not to waste their newfound freedom.
We grieve these words because they’re true. Kids do grow up fast. Our situations change. The child, spouse, parent, sister, or friend we have today will be different tomorrow. He or she will be one day older, one day stronger, or even worse—one day weaker. Each turn of the sun pushes us out of a past we can never reclaim. No wonder we grip tight to these moments as if their passing marks a thousand deaths.
In response, the concept of mindfulness has exploded in our vernacular over the past 20 years. An article in the Guardian reported that “the meditation app market was worth $97.6m in 2021 and is projected to expand to $307.1m by 2030.” These apps, along with podcasts, TED Talks, and Instagram influencers, consistently preach to us to savor the moment and live in the present. But is that message consistent with Scripture?
Savor and Remember
Of course, these appeals hold good reminders. We should train ourselves to put down our phones and push aside our to-do lists to direct our attention to the people around us. Distractions continually crowd our days and pull our focus from what truly matters.
Yet amid these good reminders, we’re burdened with guilt. While we clamor to enjoy moments with our children, spouses, or friends, we wonder if we’ve done enough. How can we measure whether we’ve savored enough? So we bend ourselves backward trying to create ideal moments. We labor toward the perfect birthday party, vacation, or family night.
Our moments together become opportunities to analyze how grateful, present, and happy we really are. If the joy of today is all we have to savor, then every evening will feel like the death of all we can’t reclaim. Memories will become the tombstones of all we let slip through our hands. Yet we weren’t made to live with this kind of fear. The noble call to “savor the moment” stands incomplete.
God doesn’t call us only to live in the moment. Instead, he invites us to savor the memories of our past right along with our present. Throughout the Scriptures, God continually beckons his people to repeatedly recall the past. The Israelite feasts, the sacraments, and dozens of verses call God’s people to pull the memories of the past into their current lives (e.g., Deut. 4:9; 6:9; 7:18; 8:11; 1 Cor. 11:24).
God invites us to savor the memories of our past right along with our present.
Parents cradled their children close and told them the stories of Yahweh to ignite in them a new resolve to follow him. A baptism at church revives the memory of our own conversion and establishes our faith as we think of how far the Lord has carried us since that day. Another drink of the cup with the body of Christ springs memories of every time we’ve come desperate for our Savior’s grace, growing our trust deeper.
Church fathers like Augustine and Aquinas understood they couldn’t live only in the moment. They consistently chose to carry the past along with them, memorizing dozens of Bible books and tomes of writing. As Mary Carruthers explains, their impetus for keeping these treasures in their memory wasn’t to entomb the past but to give it “life together in a place common to both in memory.”
Space and Time
If God routinely uses the past in the lives of his children, then we need not despair over the loss of every passing moment. The Lord will allow them to live on—in our memory. Their presence waits in our minds until our brains activate them with a mere sound, smell, taste, or touch. They come flooding back with the scent of your grandmother’s favorite pie or the ’90s pop song on the radio. Hundreds more live on in the pages of scrapbooks on our shelves or exist in strings of 0s and 1s on the hard drives of our phones, waiting to be experienced again.
I scroll through those grids of pictures on my computer as images of my children throughout the years fly by me. I see my then 1-year-old son walking for the first time and grin once more with pride. I see his bent legs and his shaky totter, and I feel the burn of the smile in my cheeks.
In his kindness, God allows us to relive the same feelings of pride and joy even as we recollect. We understand the negative aspect of this reality as it manifests in trauma, yet the positive often gets pushed to the wayside. In our race against time, we forget recollection isn’t merely a prompt for guilt but a continuation of real joy that revisits us with each memory.
God doesn’t only give us the enjoyment of our memories; through the passage of time, he allows us to derive new meaning and deeper joy. Augustine believed that “cogitation makes us expand, expansion stretches us out, and stretching makes us roomier.” This kind of careful thought won’t be accomplished in a mere moment; it requires space and time.
We can see this reality echoed through the pages of Scripture. The joy of Mary, Jesus’s mother, only grew as the passage of days allowed her the opportunity to treasure and ponder all she experienced (Luke 2:19). The apostles couldn’t fully glory in their present ministry with Jesus until God allowed their growth and understanding to provide even more joy in their memories of his work (18:34).
The Lord slowly develops our joy in the same way throughout our lives. Those times our daughter giggled with her little brother as a toddler affect us more when we see they’ve become the forebearers of the precious friendship we watch flourish years later. The memory of an afternoon spent fishing with a grandfather means much more when it’s coupled with the hundred more days of care and love that followed. We can’t see this fully in the moment. These gifts are only found in the remembering.
Marilynne Robinson’s character John Ames in Gilead believed as much. Facing his impending death, he writes to his son about a special memory: “It was an experience I might have missed. Now I only fear I will not have time enough to fully enjoy the thought of it.”
What if making the most of a moment can only be done once it’s gone? Perhaps those newborn giggles, the late-night laughing with a friend, or the evening spent in the arms of a spouse requires time to be fully enjoyed. The fullness of our joy needs time to linger and marinate with each passing day until we’ve squeezed out every last drop.
Moments and Memories
This fuller picture of memory allows us to cast off the guilt that presses in. We don’t have to scramble for picture-perfect moments or overanalyze how we spend each second. We can simply enjoy each day we’re given while remembering God will continue to bless us with its joy long after it’s gone. Our days fade like grass, yet God has enabled beauty and goodness to travel with us far beyond these fleeting moments.
What if making the most of a moment can only be done once it’s gone?
Maybe the older woman in the grocery store knows how precious this season is precisely because she’s had 10,000 more days to fully enjoy its memory. Like seeds dropped to the earth, our passing moments offer chances for new life to emerge through memory. With each recollection, the shoots stretch out a little farther, as the Lord sweetens the fruit one day at a time.
My fingers grip tight around my son as the waves rock us on the glistening water. My mind and body exhale with the exhaustion of a 35-year-old mom of three. He arches his head and plants another small kiss against my cheek. Joy and grief wash over my body. In a few months, his adult front teeth will steal the childish grin from his face. Someday soon, those tiny shoulders that nestle in my arms will grow broader than my own. The days of snuggles and kisses will be exchanged with a host of activities and interests that push him toward his full life that lies ahead.
Yet I won’t lose this moment. I’ll relive it when I return home and pack up the life jackets and smell the lake’s scent. Next month, I’ll smile again and remember the feel of his embrace as I scroll through our trip photos on my phone. Perhaps many years from now, when it’s my son’s turn to drive his parents in the boat, I’ll rock against the waves and relive it once more in the light of every sweet moment we’ve experienced since.
Yes, our moments will fade, but this is only the beginning of God’s gift.
The Gospel Coalition