Forgetfulness

Saying farewell to yesterday might be a challenge for some, but not for the numerous New Yorkers who bid a traditional farewell to 2023 in Times Square ahead of the big New Year's Eve celebration. At the 17th annual Good Riddance Day Thursday, bad memories were burned – literally.

Good Riddance Day is inspired by a Latin American tradition in which New Year’s revelers stuffed dolls with objects representing bad memories before setting them on fire.

In Times Square, attendees wrote down their bad memories on pieces of paper. "COVID," "Cancer," “Our broken healthcare system,” “Spam calls and emails,” “Bad coffee,” and “Single Use Plastics,” were some of the entries.

Every December 28, this event gives people the opportunity to write down everything they want to leave in the past and destroy any unpleasant, unhappy, and unwanted memories – so that they can toss them into an incinerator and watch them vanish.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What painful experience, memory, or consequence caused by sin would you like to leave behind in the New Year? This is a reality for the believer “Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!” (Lam 3:22-23). With Paul we can say “Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13).

At a waste-management facility in Morrisville, Pa., workers load incinerated trash into industrial machinery that separates and sorts metals, then sends them to get hosed down. The reward: buckets of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.

Americans toss as much as $68 million worth of change each year, according to Reworld. The sustainable-waste processing company is on a treasure-hunt to find it. The company says that in the seven years since it started the effort, it has collected at least $10 million worth of coins. Many coins are also getting left behind. At airport checkpoints, the Transportation Security Administration collects hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of them each year. Coins are left in couch cushions or cars, then sucked into vacuums and sent to landfills.

Sometimes these small, seemingly unvalued coins can add up to a treasure—or even a work of art. For instance, Sara and Justin Ilse finished building a floor for their home’s 230-square-foot entryway out of 65,507 pennies.

“It was a way to encase something that doesn’t get viewed with much value in daily life,” Justin said. More than 20,000 of the pennies came from jars that Sara’s father and brother-in-law kept in their closets. They bought the rest of the pennies they needed in 2,500 increments through their local bank. In addition to the $655 they spent on pennies, they also spent $1,195 on supplies such as glue and epoxy.

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Mercy; Compassion – small good works of mercy or compassion can have a huge impact and be valuable in our Lord’s eyes; (2) Spiritual gifts—our gifts may seem insignificant, under-valued, but combined with the gifts of others in the church, they can create something beautiful, (3) Giving, Generosity—like the widow’s mite, Jesus sees and values small gifts given with great sacrifice.

We may not want to admit it but author Arthur Brooks is convincing when he writes to the effect that age-related decline will come much sooner than we think. We might make excuses for ourselves but our recall of names and places is not what it used to be. He writes:

By the time you are fifty your brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library. Meanwhile, your personal research librarian is creaky, slow, and easily distracted. When you send him to get some information you need—say, someone’s name—he takes a minute to stand up, stops for coffee, talks to an old friend in the periodicals, and then forgets where he was going in the first place. Meanwhile, you are kicking yourself for forgetting something you have known for years. When the librarian finally shows back up and says, “That guy’s name is Mike,” Mike is long gone and you are doing something else.

An often-overlooked effect of missionary influence has been the preservation of languages. Language is the breath of a culture, and so the death of a language almost always results in the loss of a way of life. MIT linguist Norvin Richards expressed the importance of the preservation of languages and cultures well: “There are jokes that are only funny in Maliseet and there are songs that are only beautiful in Wôpanâak …. If we lose those languages, we lose little pieces of the beauty and richness of the world.”

In 2019, the United Nations warned, “Almost half the world’s estimated 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearing.” Many minority languages are lost when younger generations are educated in national languages. Written languages have a much better chance of survival than exclusively oral ones and many small, unique languages have been preserved by Bible translation.

In one remarkable case, the Wôpanâak language was brought back to life a hundred years after its last speakers died. The linguistic revival was based on the translation work of missionary John Eliot. The first Bible published in colonial America was in the Wôpanâak language in 1663. As a result of Eliot’s literacy efforts, the Wampanoag tribe left behind a collection of written documents when disease ravaged their population.

In the 1990s, Jessie Little Doe Baird, a descendant of the tribe Eliot sought to reach, used those records to revive the Wôpanâak language as part of a linguistics program at MIT. Her daughter is the first native Wôpanâak speaker in seven generations and six other Wampanoags have become fluent in the language. Interestingly, one of Baird’s Wampanoag ancestors publicly opposed missionary work in the eighteenth century.

When artificially-intelligent robots began to first play chess, many analysts regarded it as a game-breaking innovation. But in Russia, you don’t break the game; the game breaks you. At least that was the case at the Moscow Open in July. According to local media, a seven-year-old boy named Christopher was playing against such a robot when it grabbed the boy’s finger, eventually breaking it.

Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, acknowledged the incident in a comically understated fashion. Lazarev said, “The robot broke the child’s finger. This is of course bad.” Lazarev went on to explain that the robot had played several matches with other children without incident, and explained that the injury occurred because Christopher had probably forgotten to abide by one of the safety guidelines where players are supposed to let the robot finish its move before starting another move in response.

According to Lazarev, Christopher was not overly traumatized from the injury. He said, “The child played the very next day and finished the tournament.”

A federation official was quick to affirm that such injuries are rare and that the robot is still safe to engage. “There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall. ... Apparently, children need to be warned. It happens.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes technology that seems harmless can contain hidden dangers. We should be careful in how we make consumer decisions, particularly when deploying technology around our loved ones.

As we age, many of us become distressed about our inability to recall names, words, or ideas as quickly as maybe we used to. But according to a new study, perhaps there is good reason for us not to be so upset.

Drs. Ryan and Frankland summarize, in an article on SciTechDaily.com, “Changes in our ability to access specific memories are based on environmental feedback and predictability. Rather than being a bug, forgetting may be a functional feature of the brain, allowing it to interact dynamically with the environment.”

Even so, what we think of as “forgetting” is not a permanent state of being.

Memories are stored in ensembles of neurons called ‘engram cells’ … and forgetting occurs when engram cells cannot be reactivated. The memories themselves are still there, but … it’s as if the memories are stored in a safe but you can’t remember the code to unlock it.

In other words, as a way of adapting to new circumstances, our brains automatically learn to prioritize certain memories and allow others go into cold storage. This cognitive adaptation, though occasionally embarrassing, has an upside.

In a changing world, forgetting some memories can be beneficial as this can lead to more flexible behavior and better decision-making. If memories were gained in circumstances that are not wholly relevant to the current environment, forgetting them can be a positive change that improves our wellbeing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God wants us to be free from the crippling bondage of our former mistakes. Even a God whose memory is eternal and infallible, promises “I will remember their sins no more” (Heb. 8:12).

Most of us regularly lose things: keys, wallets, TV remotes, glasses, and phones. Some of us are more prone to misplacing things than others. It’s not surprising that men are twice as likely to lose their phones than women. One study concluded that the average person misplaces nine things a day and spends an average of fifteen minutes looking for lost items.

Why does this happen? What is the psychology and science behind it? It comes down to a breakdown of attention and memory. When we misplace our belongings, "we fail to activate the part of our brain responsible for encoding what we're doing." The hippocampus part of our brain is responsible for taking a snapshot and preserving the memory in a set of neurons that can be activated later. We lose things when we do not have a clear reference point of when or where we put down objects like our keys or glasses.

One of the ways we can improve our memory is through practicing mindfulness. We do this by stepping back and calming our thoughts, focusing on being present in the moment.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can lose more than our physical possession! We can misplace our hope, peace, joy, and love. Advent is a season where we can refocus and become mindful of what we have received in Christ's coming.

Shiro Oguni opened a restaurant in Shizuoka, Japan in which all the waiting staff have dementia. In a YouTube video, the owner explains his vision, “Dementia is so widely misunderstood. People believe you can’t do anything for yourself and the condition will often mean complete isolation from society. We want to change society to become more caring and easy-going, so we can live together in harmony.”

The video then shows us the kitchen where Shiro and the chefs are cooking food. In a voiceover Shiro says, “We opened a limited period popup restaurant where all the waiting staff are dementia patients … and what did we call ourselves? The ‘Restaurant of Mistaken Orders.’”

The video then shows the wait staff lined up at the door of the restaurant bowing to the customers as they enter the restaurant. Then they take orders and begin bringing the orders to customers seated at the tables. One elderly server has a delicious plate of food which she offers to a guest, who smiling shakes her head that this is not what was ordered. The server says with a big smile, “It isn’t? Oops! Sorry dear.” Another waiter puts a drink in front of a customer only to take it back. “Oh, sorry, that wasn’t right. Oh no it was! I heard what you said, but I just can’t remember!” Another waiter needs help in totaling the bill and the customers kindly help them with the math.

There is an atmosphere of joy and smiles at every table as the wait staff needs help getting the plates of food to the correct person and words of gentle apology about the confusion.

Shiro says, “Our restaurant is stylish, and serves great food. If your order was mistaken, you can shrug it off with a smile and enjoy what comes your way anyway. The name, ‘The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders,’ allows our customers to enter with an open mind. They expected mistakes, so were OK with it. It created an air of easy-going acceptance. I’m convinced that if our message become more mainstream society will become more tolerant and open.”

The video ends with a summary:

37% of orders were mistaken

But 99% of customers said they were happy

You can watch the 2-minute video here.

Editor’s Note: According to the World Health Organization (3/22), there are currently 55 million dementia patients worldwide and this number is predicted to increase to 152 million by 2050.

In his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr calls the Internet "a technology of forgetfulness" and describes how, thanks to the plasticity of our neural pathways, our brains are literally, being rewired by digital distraction:

The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be dis­tracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we're away from our comput­ers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering.

We are reading a ton on our devices and screens—we ac­tually read a novel's worth of words every day. (But) it is not the sort of continuous, sustained, concentrated reading conducive to reflective thinking. Maryanne Wolf argues: “There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests.”

Our rapid-fire toggling between spectacles—an episode of a Hulu show here, a Spotify album there, and scanning a friend's blog post—works against wisdom in the moment, by eliminating any time for reflection or synthesis before the next thing beckons. But it also works against wisdom in the long term, as brain research is showing. Our overstimulated brains are becoming weaker, less critical, and more gullible at a time in history when we need them to be sharper than ever.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Wisdom is not about getting to answers as fast as possible. It's more often about the journey, the bigger picture, the questions and complications along the way. There is great value in a slower intake of information with time for meditation and retention.

The song The Living Years by Mike +The Mechanics was released in 1988 and became a worldwide hit. It was nominated for four Grammy awards and was written by the group’s founder Mike Rutherford and songwriter B.A. Robertson. Both had recently lost their father and had regrets of not being closer and expressing personal feelings before their deaths.

Mike Rutherford's father, Crawford, died in England at the age of 80. Mike had been on tour in Chicago and two weeks later flew to England for the funeral. He then flew back to Chicago in time for his next show.

After lots of reflection, Mike realized that he was so wrapped up in his own career during this time that he was neglecting his loved ones, especially his dad. His father had been a captain in the Royal Navy, but hadn’t discussed his time fighting in World War II and Korea. He wrote his memoirs, but they were never published. When Mike discovered them, he learned a great deal about the man and once again felt regret over not spending more time with him.

Over the years many people have written to Rutherford saying the song inspired them to get back in touch with their father.

Part of the lyrics are:

I wasn't there that morning

When my Father passed away

I didn't get to tell him

All the things I had to say

I think I caught his spirit

Later that same year

I'm sure I heard his echo

In my baby's new born tears

I just wish I could have told him in the living years

You can watch “The Living Years Official Video” here.

Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth about $220 million. The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin.

The problem is that years ago Mr. Thomas lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations—to no avail. Thomas said, “I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

Bitcoin has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time. But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent—currently worth around $140 billion—appear to be in lost or stranded wallets. Brad Yasar has put his hard drives, containing millions of dollars in Bitcoin, in vacuum-sealed bags out of sight. He said, “I don’t want to be reminded every day … of what I lost.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This sad story is in sharp contrast with the security of our inheritance that is guaranteed in heaven. “An inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4).

In a recent Scientific American article, writer John Horgan challenges the far-fetched ideas of atheistic physicists and scientists. Their existential concern is that in the distant future when man and life are no more, what then will have been the point of it all?

Horgan writes:

Our works of science, mathematics, philosophy, art, music and, yes, journalism will slip back into the void whence they came. Everything we have thought and done will be for naught. If nothing about us endures, if nothing is remembered, we might as well never have existed.

Horgan argues that many scientists actually do believe in God--which gives their lives meaning and the comfort of knowing they will never be forgotten. But leading the charge against scientists who believe is physicist Leonard Susskind who contends that when the entire universe will ultimately collapse in on itself and be destroyed, black holes will remain. All information and memory of man will be preserved in the outer membrane of a black hole.

Horgan points out how implausible and fantastic this belief is, including: “Long after our sun and even the entire Milky Way have flickered out, aliens with godlike powers … could in principle … reconstruct the lives of every person who has ever lived.”

Willie Carson, the famous British jockey, was racing one day at Pontefract. He was happily leading on the rails. A furlong and a half from home he thought he heard something at his back and, glancing round, he saw the shadow of a horse coming up behind. Determined that he should not be beaten, he spurred on and was first at the finish line. He looked round again and saw that the nearest horse was fifteen lengths behind--he had been racing his own shadow for the last part of the race.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes we are haunted by the memory of a mistake, a regret from our past. It is as if there is a shadow looming over us, preventing us from going forward. God has forgiven our past and calls us to move forward into his future (Phillipians 3:13).

Responding to a previous calamity, Colorado governor Jared Polis decided upon a practical, utilitarian solution. When a rockslide caused a giant boulder the size of a house to tumble down and gouge a huge chunk from highway 145 near the southwestern town of Dolores, Polis decided to simply leave it there. State officials say that taxpayers will be better served by allowing the boulder to remain as a memorial of the freak accident and rebuilding the highway next to it.

The total cost of rebuilding the section of highway, which includes a new section of guardrail next to the boulder, is estimated at $1.3 million, according to budget estimates. Taxpayers are expected to save around $200,000, which is what it would’ve cost had they decided to blast the 8.5-million-pound boulder into smaller rock fragments. The boulder has been dubbed “Memorial Rock,” because the rockslide happened on Memorial Day weekend.

Potential Preaching Angle: Whether from unforeseen calamity or serendipitous blessing, it is important to use momentous occasions as memory markers. These help us remember what we've gone through and how God was faithful throughout.

In a 2017 lecture, Mark Meynell addressed the connection between identity and memory:

BBC Radio 3, the U.K.'s primary classical music station, ran a fascinating series of articles on music and memory. Adam Zeman, a Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, wrote about amnesia and memory loss and their relationship to epilepsy. Zeman mentioned two patients, Peter and Marcus, who described their amnesia in very similar terms. One said: "My memory of my past is a blank space. I feel lost and hopeless. I'm trying to explore a void." Both described how disconcerting it is to look at photos. Even though they recognize themselves, they have no recollection of the moment. One said that it's like "reading a biography of a stranger." He's conscious of recent memories slipping away from him, like ships sailing out to sea in the fog, never to be seen again.

Two things stand out in Zeman's essay. First, without memory, it's hard to cling to an identity. So one of the patients said: "I don't have the moorings that other people draw on to know who they are." Second, it's hard to have hope when we don't know our past. As Zeman explained, "The inability to invoke the past greatly impedes their ability to imagine a future."

Possible Preaching Angles: In the Lord's Supper Jesus has invited us to be a community of remembrance. The Lord's Supper gives us our spiritual moorings. It gives us the "ability to imagine a future."

Mary Kidd and her colleagues meet every week in a loft in New York City with a clear mission—to digitize and preserve old VHS tapes. The loft has racks of tape decks, oscilloscopes, vector scopes and wave-form monitors that help ensure a quality transfer from analog to digital.

Kidd and the others are archivists and preservationists for XFR Collective (pronounced Transfer Collective). And while the mood is light, there is a sense of a deadline. That's because VHS tapes probably can't survive beyond 15 to 20 years. Some call this the "magnetic media crisis" and archivists, preservationists, and librarians like the ones in the XFR Collective are trying to reverse it.

Sounds and images are magnetized onto strips of tape, but over time the tape slowly loses its magnetic properties. Most tapes were recorded in the 1980s and '90s, when video cameras first became widely available. That means even the best-kept tapes will eventually be unwatchable. The thing is, many people don't realize their tapes are degrading.

And some who do know —like Mary Kidd — haven't even gotten around to their own tapes. "Sometimes I do fall asleep at night thinking to myself, 'Oh my gosh, is this tape in the storage space that I own slowly turning into goo?'" So the volunteers devote themselves to this work because if they don't save these intimate, personal histories, it's possible no one will.

Possible Preaching Angle: Protection, Divine; Rewards; Memories; What we store with God is safe for eternity without loss, decay, or fading. As Paul told Timothy, "I … am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day." (2 Timothy 1:12)

According to a British survey, 40 percent of moms have received an unwanted Mother's Day gift, but most of them were too polite to complain. Here's a partial list of the 30 worst Mother's Day gifts (according to moms who actually received these gifts):

• Deodorant
• Fire extinguisher
• Cleaning supplies
• A stick of French bread
• Salad dressing
• Popcorn
• Ants (perhaps an ant farm for Mom)
• Hair dye
• Screwdriver
• Toilet roll
• Calculator
• Car parts

Another newspaper ran an article titled "20 awful Mother's Day cards that you absolutely should not buy." The article is clear: Do NOT buy these cards, but just in case you're curious here are a few examples:

• Mom, thanks for always checking up on me (with a picture of a cell phone with 24 unanswered calls from "Mom").
• Well I guess this Mother's Day card is late. Looks like someone wasn't raised properly.
• I'm awesome. You're welcome. To the luckiest Mom ever.
• Mom I love you loads. (A picture of a laundry basket overflowing with clothes.) Speaking of loads … can you do my laundry?

Where's Susan? That's the innocent question Joshua Rogers's daughter asked as they were reading The Last Battle, the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis. Susan is the child queen who helped her siblings save Narnia from the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. However, she is conspicuously absent from an early scene in The Last Battle that includes every character who traveled to Narnia as a child. Rogers writes:

"Daddy, where is she?" my daughter asked again.

"We'll see," I said, with a tinge of sadness.

Although I've read The Chronicles of Narnia dozens of times since I was a boy, Susan's tragic end gets me every time. The book eventually reveals that Susan grows up and outgrows her love for Narnia. We get few details about her until the end of the book, when High King Peter responds to an inquiry into his sister's whereabouts.

"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."

"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"

Susan thought she had become too grown up for thoughts of a great king like Aslan and a blessed land like Narnia and, though she had once experienced it, she left it behind.