It’s always overwhelming. A surge of memories, a rush of emotions. I call it selective recollection. My mind only remembers what it wants to, specific good things, specific bad things. It’s funny how my brain tries to shape what I think based off of what I remember. The if I don’t remember it, it didn’t happen approach. So many times we allow selective recollection to dictate and determine what we do and how we think. It makes us paranoid, encourages us to draw conclusions, and requires that we rely on assumptions when making decisions.

I still haven’t figured out what it is inside of me that makes me crave attention. Is it a lack of God in my life? Poor quality of personal relationships? Or maybe it’s just my selective recollection, only allowing myself to be defined by certain things. It’s amazing at how quick we are to forget where we come from, what we are made of, and who we owe that to. We blame our parents for not giving us perfection, and we question God’s plan when things don’t go our way. Our selective memory carries us for a while. We feel sorry for ourselves, displace blame, and suck as much as we can out of relationships as long as they benefit us.

When we allow our memories to be selective we never really take responsibility for our actions. It makes us quick to judge, fast to act, and slow to forgive. Selective recollection holds us back, keeping us from fulfilling our potential. It is what causes us to say, “Not your will God, but mine.” So many times we like to take bad situations and only remember the good things, or we like to take mistakes that we made and convince ourselves that it is someone else’s fault. By remembering only the good things from bad situations, or the bad things from good situations, we are lying to ourselves about what really happened. Ultimately we are doing nothing more than justify and rationalizing our actions.

Memories are beautiful. Memories give us hope, and memories are what we cling to when all else has faded away. But if we don’t learn how to be honest with ourselves, if we never sort through our memories and differentiate between what is fact and what is fantasy, then we will see our lives transformed into a false reality. Once we go to that point and cross the line between memories and fantasies it is a long, hard, and perilous road to come back from.

I’ve always wondered how much my memories change. Do I always remember things the same way? Or do the details change ever so slightly when I think of something over and over again? It’s a hard transition from learning from memories and allowing them to define what you do and how you think. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed and think that we will never be able to see past them, or to think that they will always haunt us. And that is where the transition must begin, the place where we learn from our memories and move past them must start there. And once we are able to do that, then we are ready to step out and begin to change and shape our future by creating new memories.

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