Your Stories
Footprint
Before we left, we stopped at the front steps of the house where we saw the imprint of my wife’s foot when she was six months old and her brother’s hand when he was 19 months old. Her father had poured the cement and saw it fitting to make his pride and joy the signature to his work. To anyone else, the small shallow prints were indiscernible, and that building was just another abandoned home. To us, it was a memorial like an Old Testament altar that was a reminder of God’s faithfulness, ushering us into a time of reflective prayer and worship.
After returning home, I felt an appreciation for God being poured out over me which left an aftertaste of private shame over my general forgetfulness. I reflected on Hosea 13:6 which reads “When I fed them, they were satisfied, when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me.” I wanted to remember this scripture as a principle to help me savor my time with God, knowing that my active choice to remember or hang on to what He’s already given me would play a powerful role in transforming me as I spent time in His presence.
Time and time again throughout the Old Testament God commands his people to build memorials to remind them of how He’s worked in a powerful way for them. These memorials would serve to not only remind them but also the generations to come about how the Almighty God worked on behalf of His children. What I realized standing on the front steps of Delia’s first home is that actively working to remember how God has blessed us adds to our faith and consistently compels us to live our lives following Christ’s example.
Choosing to remember God’s faithfulness is a strong catalyst to a life of obedience. I think we can all agree that it is easier to talk about obedience than to walk the life of obedience.
We sometimes find ourselves going through the motions instead of sincerely living it out, not because of a lack of genuine desire but because we’ve lost our focus on the reason for our worship. Rather than adding on to the great testimony that God is building in our lives, we hang on to what He is doing in the present. Have we forgotten what God has done for us time and time again? Have we overlooked how He has spoken to us so powerfully about decisions we struggled with? The more we are faithful to remember all that we have learned about God, the more we can live out the faith that was written about Abraham in Romans 4:18-21, which is the type of faith that believes “against all hope” and does not waver in unbelief because we are “fully persuaded that God has power to do what He has promised.” Abraham’s fellowship with God gave him the full assurance that made him the vessel of such a powerful witness of God’s love.
As I thought about these lessons I’ve learned, I found myself remembering the hand and foot print which gave me the insight to reflect in the first place. I wanted to capture the memorial that was used as a reminder on how we should approach our time of worship. So for Delia’s Christmas gift this past year, I flew to Texas and drove out to Lamesa to take a mold of the hand and foot print that was laid 26 years ago. I had no idea if the print was even there anymore. With the help of some children’s craft supplies and after hundreds of miles on the road and several drive-through restaurants, I was able to present Delia with this reminder of God’s amazing faithfulness to us. It adds to a collection of memorials that reminds us of who God is in our lives. These reminders faithfully help us add to our love for God and challenge us to live fruitful lives for Him. 