Many days, I live a relatively normal life. The work that I'm doing, that God is doing, in facing and healing my past goes on but doesn't dictate my daily activities. I still wake up and keep up with all that I am responsible for in my house with my family. It's always there, but life moves along okay.
Other days, trauma takes over. I don't always know what triggers it, but the past comes too close to the present. Memories mingle with reality. It takes all the effort I can expend to breathe and stay as much in the present as I can.On those days, the ones where what's been done looms over me like a threat, I struggle to remember anything. I try so hard, but my mind is so busy trying to keep the past in the past and my lungs remembering to breathe that it just doesn't have the capacity to remember much else.
I can't keep up a conversation. I will be focusing as hard as I can, but when it's my turn to speak, my mind goes blank. The words spoken just moments ago escape me, and I must ask the other person to repeat themselves. I'll be asked if I can get something nearby for someone, but as soon as I walk across the room, I no longer can remember what I was getting.
On trauma days, it takes so much work just to breathe, just to stay in today, that my mind cannot keep up with anything else. The daily to do list goes undone, and by bed time, I've accomplished nothing more than being alive. In fact, I can't even remember what I did that day at all. It's frustrating and disheartening. When I forget everything, I feel forgotten myself.
Yet Psalm 56:8 says
"You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?" (NASB)
I came across that verse while studying something else, completely unrelated actually. However, when I read C. H. Spurgeon's notes on this verse, it brought to mind trauma days, and yet it brought comfort too. When speaking of this verse, of God taking account of David's wanderings, Spurgeon noted this,
"We perhaps are so confused after a long course of trouble, that we hardly know where we have or where we have not been; but the omniscient and considerate Father of our spirits remembers all in detail."
Yes, those trauma days leave me hardly knowing where I have or have not been, yet my Abba Father remembers in detail everything I forget. Though in days of forgetfulness I feel forgotten, I am anything but. I am still known, deeply, and I am loved all the more. What great comfort to know that when I forget, God remembers.
Dear one, you well acquainted with trauma days and forgetfulness, you are not forgotten. Every step trauma steals, every moment trauma misplaces, every conversation trauma conceals, He remembers them all. His care and compassion see everything trauma takes. He remembers, and He loves.
