Good Friday: Need to Remember, Want to Forget

What did I eat again???

Breakfast: 2 pieces of peanut butter toast, banana
Lunch: lots of trail mix, cherry tomatoes and carrot sticks, strawberries.
Dinner: more carrots, German potato salad, a blueberry and pumpkin seed muffin with nutella. Chocolate pretzels (with rainbow sprinkles!)

Origin of an Item: This is the reason the muffins came out so good. Ted’s Organic Grains. Who said wheat doesn’t grow in IL? It’s even more precious because it’s hard to find.  There’s basically a secret handshake involved at any farmers’ market to procure it.

Theological Reflection:

Today on Good Friday, Christians remember Jesus’ death. I am struck by the words of one of the criminals crucified next to Jesus. “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom” (emphasis mine). Remember me because I’m that someone everyone wants to forget. I’m the one that people ignore and despise.

Lent is ending, and so is my time of remembering every last thing I ate every day—okay only every other day. : )  Then I go back to not keeping track. But isn’t Lent supposed to change how I am in the world, going forward, just a little?

I want to take away the practice of remembering. By this I don’t mean remembering what I ate—that was super hard sometimes! (Good thing I always eat grapefruit at breakfast).No, I want to remember that I ate.  And that I ate well. And that I’ll eat again.

And that is a beautiful thing—I want to remember that too. There’s safety and security in knowing we have been filled, and that we’ll eat our fill again. Obviously many in this world can’t practice a remembrance like this because, well, they don’t have 3 solid meals a day.  

But at the same time, when we only remember our own experiences, we catch cultural amnesia.  Forget about the poor or the hungry. We do such a good job of training ourselves to forget beggars as soon as we are past them, we’re at the point we don’t bother to look them in the eye as we blow by. Their invisibility is our willed forgetfulness.

Today, Jesus was told by a societal outcast: Don’t forget. Remember me. What would we just as soon forget about, and what can we ask Jesus to remember?

Erika