Devotions for Teachers: Remember Him

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.

Colossians 3:15

The word ‘remember’ kept showing up in my life this week. I read Annie Downs’ book Remembering God (a great read, by the way), and then that same weekend our pastor led a sermon on the remembrance of God. And I heard song lyrics on the way home about remembering Him. It struck me as a funny coincidence, but when I sat down to pray the next morning, the word “remember” was heavy on my mind again.

So I started thinking on it…what does it mean? Why was I being prompted to remember? Remember what?

And, in the stillness of that moment, it hit me very hard, that I have been very, very blessed, but I have not done a good job of remembering it.

Last week, you may have read my post about being overwhelmed, and you may have noticed that I was overwhelmed all by great things. I will be 30 this month (another post for another day, because sheesh does a milestone birthday come with some feelings), and this is the thing about my life: I have everything I said I wanted by the time I turned 30. I have a good marriage, I have healthy kids, I own a home in a safe, happy neighborhood. I have a career. I even have been blessed with some things I wouldn’t have dared to dream for myself…like running a business, for example.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m boasting, because I’m not. Even as I write this out now, my eyes are welling up with tears. I have been so blessed, and I have barely taken the time to reflect on it. I have barely said thank you. I certainly don’t deserve all of this goodness.

Sometimes it’s easier to remember God when things are hard, or stressful, or uncertain. But when you make a plan in your head, and things go according to that plan, you get this false sense of confidence that it was you. But it wasn’t. You feel secure in the idea that you will keep getting what you wanted, because you’re the one who made all of this happen. But you didn’t. Ask anyone who is at a point in their lives where they aren’t where they planned to be: they will tell you they feel powerless. If there were some magical formula out there that got you exactly what your heart wanted, they would have done it a long time ago.

Of course I didn’t do any of this on my own.

So there, on my couch in the quiet before my babies woke up, God prompted me to give thanks. And to remember. To remember that the blessings I have received were given by Him. And to be humbled by the fact that getting what my heart wanted, and what God planned for me to have has aligned thus far, but it may not always be that way.

So today, my prayer for all of us is that we remember what we’ve been blessed with, whether it was our hope for ourselves or not, and to Remember God even when things are really good, not only when we need help. Because the good things were given to us as reprieve from the stress, and the hard, and we should fully enjoy them while we have them. As my pastor likes to say: You either are coming out of the storm, you are in the storm, or you are about to head into the storm…but until you’re sitting in the storm, you don’t know when it’s coming. And the faith that God is good and He provides when things are going exactly as you planned is what will carry you through when things go off course.

Have a great, blessed, hopeful week, teacher friends.

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