July 23, 2013 (Tuesday)
Now that I am firmly planted in my 80’s, I find myself more interested than ever in my childhood, wondering about my ancestry, and wanting to know more about history, especially American history.
Finding myself thinking more than ever about the past, my curiosity has been aroused and I ask myself, “Why is this so?”
I don’t really know why. But I can venture a guess. There is a universal quest for significance. We want our lives to mean something, to count for something. We don’t want to be forgotten after we’re gone. Perhaps remembering our ancestors is our way of setting an example for those who will survive us.
As we get into our eighties, we become aware that we want to be remembered, and so our minds perform that task for us and we find ourselves reminiscing and reliving our own lives. Often we hear ourselves telling stories about our past to our children because they are things about us they never knew. We want them to know and remember. In order to tell them, we have to recall the events of our lives ourselves.
The Apostle Paul was a man of action who rarely reminisced, but shortly before his death at age 66, he wrote to his son in the ministry, Timothy, “I have fought the good fight; I have kept the faith.” Would that all of us could say that, too.