The Miracle of Memory--by Linden Malki

We celebrate when a child is born; we have high hopes for the person he becomes.  We mourn when someone dies, but we celebrate as well when someone has left a legacy of hope.  The Resurrection is unique--we celebrate a life  and a death--but also a return.  Jesus taught for about three years, and what He said has not been forgotten. What He did, is an example for two thousand years--but the most memorable thing He did cannot be repeated.  This was the basic message: "Fellow Israelites,

listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourself know. This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep his hold on him."*

One of the miracles of human life is memory.  We depend on our memory to know what to do when we wake up in the morning,  what we do next, how to get from where we are to where to go next.  We remember a surprising amount of our past life, and even more amazing, we recall things that we were told by other people--some of which may have been told and retold, verbally and in writing, for hundreds, and even thousands of years. The passage  I just quoted as been part of our heritage for very close to nineteen hundred and eighty-five years and at least three languages.  It is even more amazing when we realize that shortly after this message was originally delivered, the place that it was heard was conquered, and many of the original records were lost or destroyed. However, this message was told, retold, written down, and spread from its origin in Jerusalem to Asia Minor (today's Turkey), Greece, Egypt, and pretty much the whole eastern Mediterranean, to the imperial capital of Rome within thirty years, within the lifetime of many of its original listeners. Within a generation or two it had spread as far west as Britain and as far east as India, and the written copies are amazingly similar across the miles. In fact, it was quoted so often in other writings that a very high percentage of the core writings can be reproduced from those quotations.

We take for granted the volume of preserved knowledge, scriptural and otherwise, that has survived, and in some cases  been  lost and recovered.  There is much we don't know about how memory works, from stories told and retold, and even more amazing, written, translated and preserved.  There is much we don't about intelligence, and creativity, and how people think in different ways but we can still learn from each other. There are also differences in knowledge and understanding; there are people who have creative ideas but different mental processes.  People can disagree and reject other people's ideas, and come out in totally different places.  We believe that the story we have received is trustworthy, and we will be held accountable for how we tell it, and how we live it out.
*Acts 2:22-24