WE ALL HAVE AMNESIA 🤷‍♀️

It’s easy to forget. Or is it? Let’s do a little science. There’s the brain, and in it are all these transmitters and receptors which either send or receive stuff from other parts of the body. Dopamine is the happy hormone – or at least it’s what it’s most known for. In 2012 scientists discovered dopamine actually regulates both the acquisition and forgetting of memories. So funny thing is, according to their findings, whenever a new memory is formed, there is a dopamine-based mechanism that actively attempts to erase those new memories unless some importance is attached to them.

Point is, essentially we’re wired to forget stuff!

If I haven’t already lost you, permit me to make my point. Forgetting is an active part of your brain’s work. We forget simple things like people’s names and where we last left the TV remote. We forget important things like how we were before we knew… before you knew what salvation felt like, before your default settings changed to a tongue-speaking scripture-quoting genius. We forget how hard it was to move forward, how it felt to say “the things I do not want to do are those I do and the things I want to do are those I cannot do”. In 2017, I got to a place in my life where I had to question everything I knew and start afresh.

I was back at Square 1 and all I could remember was the feeling of just not knowing how to begin or where to move next to.

And then I realized how easily I had forgotten the feeling of frustration…of wanting to proceed and not knowing how to, and how easy it was to judge people who quite hadn’t figured out their own hows. Prior to this ‘shakeup’ I was experiencing, I had been at stage where it was hard for me to understand why it was so hard for people to JUST DO things. I thought, ‘How difficult can it be, really?’ My simple conclusion would be that the person either just was not trying hard enough or just didn’t want it badly enough.

Dopamine had done a good job of erasing the journey to my Canaan because I was already drinking milk and honey flowing from the land.

What did that make me? A good Christian with godly standards and pretty high expectations…of myself and of others. But it also made me a ‘forgetter’ of the journey, and of patience, and of baby steps. All of a sudden any Christian who couldn’t speak in tongues or do 2/3hours of prayer couldn’t possibly be a serious Christian. I lost my understanding of the journey God takes each one of us on, and the deserts and droughts He allows us to drag ourselves through before we finally learned to hold the staff and boldly stand in front of Pharaoh and say ‘Let my people go!’.

If all you glean from all I’m saying is that mediocrity is fine, we need to lay hands on you fam. God still expects us to grow…His standards have not changed, because so long as the heir remains a child he is no different from a slave although he be lord of all’ – Galatians 4:1

What I’m hoping you’ll glean from this is that you haven’t always known what you know today, and you haven’t always been who you are today. If you have forgotten, cast your mind back to your days of struggle, and let it be a source of understanding in how you deal with the rest of the world…especially they who long to do better with God.

If you’re the person on the other side…the person struggling to find stability, keep pressing. This walk operates pretty much as how the body and food operate. One meal cannot sustain you for a year…not even a month. that’s why we keep eating. By the end of the year, when you look back, it would have been those little meals that kept you for short periods that would have accumulated to sustain you for a year, or two or fifty. That’s how growth operates…the beauty is in the little glimses of light in between the cracks. So keep reading. Keep praying. Keep fellowshipping. You’ll do just fine.

T.D Jakes says ‘we have the tendency of expecting people to be finished products, while we ourselves are work in progress.’

Extend the same grace the Lord extended to you while you beat the waters to figure out how to navigate your way around the waters. More so because we’re each still merely beholding as in a glass the image into which we’re being transformed into -into the image of Christ from glory to glory – 2 Corinthians 3:18.

Yours extending a hand of grace,

❤ RAD ❤