by Allison Martin
Memories must be one of the strangest, most wonderful ideas God ever had. They’re fascinating. In my mind’s eye, I could walk you through the halls of Crutchfield Elementary School and show you exactly where I sat in Mrs. Wiggins’ fourth grade class, scribbling out my very first essay. But I honestly could not tell you what I ate for dinner last night.
In our lifetime, millions of moments pass through the filter of our memory. Most come and go, never to be recalled again. But a few moments will have an impact too large to disappear into the forgotten. We recognize some of these moments as life changing when they happen. Other moments are disguised in the most casual of circumstances. They are quietly filed away in our memory unaware. Only later do we look back and realize their full significance.
The events that stick out in your mind, and the response you chose to them, are the tools that have shaped you. The person you are today is a compilation of all the moments you’ll never forget.
The question is, then: how do we make the moments that make people? I think it’s simple. We pay the price for an unforgettable moment.
Unforgettable moments come in all shapes and sizes, but they aren’t cheap. They cost us the status quo of doing what everyone else has always done (or not done). The price tag of unforgettable demands that we rise above “normal”. These moments of impact cost us the luxury of only doing what we feel like, when we feel like doing it.
It’s expensive, I know. But here’s why it works…
We remember what was first.
It’s so awkward to be first. Whether you’re first in line at the church dinner or the first to invite a new friend to coffee, it’s scary. It’s uncomfortable to start a conversation with someone you’ve never reached out to, or begin a new ministry that no one in your church has ever done before. It feels daunting to send an encouraging text to someone that normally seems more comfortable to discuss the weather.
Being the first is open fire for the criticism of others or our own overthinking. That’s probably why we usually aren’t. We wait until someone else does it, except they don’t either. And we let our what-ifs reason us right out of a moment that could change someone’s life.
What if the ministry you begin reaches the right person just in time?
What if you’re the first real friend they’ve ever had?
What if they’ve never felt like someone believed in them, until you did?
What if the simple invitation or conversation or encouragement becomes a milestone in their story of a moment they’ll never forget?
We remember what was unexpected.
Don’t you? The coffee that showed up on your doorstep, the meal someone paid for, the card in the mail that came at such a perfect time it was almost creepy. Don’t you remember when they texted to check in on a situation you were sure that everyone had forgotten about? Or when someone sought you out to give you some encouragement when you didn’t think anyone even knew you were in the building.
You remember it, and in some small way it shaped you. You weren’t expecting anyone to notice you or remember some detail of your life. But they did.
So much of our lives are lived purely out of habit. We do today what we did yesterday, and we’ll do it all over again tomorrow.
Maybe the most meaningful thing we could do for someone today is not elaborate or extreme, but just different. Out of the ordinary. Unexpected.
We remember what was consistent.
Through a lifetime of sitting on the pew in thousands of church services, who leaves the marks on our lives?
The ones who worship whether it’s the middle of campmeeting, or a Wednesday night when half of the congregation stayed home.
The ones who poured themselves into making Sunday School exciting, even if it was just for seven year olds.
The ones who always had a testimony of God’s faithfulness, even as they got bad news upon bad news.
Consistency is our most powerful testimony. It will be what impacts because it will be what’s remembered.
I hope I haven’t over complicated this. Unforgettable does not mean spending a lot of money or planning an elaborate gesture. Unforgettable moments usually cost our comfort zones, intentionality, or faithfulness. You may never even know the impact of the moment you created. In this life, at least. But in eternity, maybe we’ll see all the moments of our lives laid out in front of us. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have someone point to some small thing you did or said, and say, “That’s it. That’s the moment. The one that changed everything.”
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