Testimony Tuesday: Remember

Today this post links to Testimony Tuesday on Holly Barrett's blog, and Jennifer Dukes Lee's Tell His Story.

A big "thank you" to T of Praying on the Prairie for inspiring me to start participating in some blog link-ups. There are a lot of them―dozens, maybe even a hundred or so! Five Minute Friday features a word prompt, so that's both easy and a little challenging. Others are a more generic write what you like on this topic.

Although I've decided to write every week for Testimony Tuesday, I missed last week for the (very) good reason of needing to deliver some client design on time. For today, here's the entire chapter of Deuteronomy 8 with its charges to "remember" and to "take care that you do not forget by failing to keep the commandments." Is it not interesting how scripture connects obeying and remembering? As real-life friend and former next-door neighbor Sara, who blogs at The Jensen Family commented, "remember" is the gospel in a single word!

This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe, so that you may live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. ... Therefore keep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills...

"So that you may live and increase"―rather than die and decrease. Re-member, put together again, re-construct the history of God's grace, God's faithfulness, God's gracious, mighty acts from the past in liturgy, in sacrament, in story, in poetry, with photographs and with art, maybe by re-enacting past events as you go through this day today. Talk your testimony? Of course! But you need to walk it, too, you need to bring it to life. What are my own Deuteronomy 8 "remember" equivalents? What are yours?

A reminder from scripture and a question for everyone make my Testimony Tuesday for today.