Once you hear the question you can’t unhear it, and you can’t help but think about it. Last month I completed my third tour of duty as an Elder at Germantown Presbyterian Church. It was also my turn to give the devotional that opened the Session meeting. The focus was gratitude. I am grateful to you for reading these articles. I hope you find them useful. I hope you find this one useful. It went something like this…
You’re going to go home tonight with a question on your minds and hearts. You’ll probably discuss it with your spouse or children or parents or friends. It’s kind of a bold claim, I know, but we’ll see if I’m right.
Tonight, I’m going to talk about gratitude. It’s right up there with love as one of the main ways we respond to God’s grace, if not THE way. It’s a theme that appears in the Bible hundreds of times. You could almost pick a page at random, but Thessalonians 5:16-18 pretty much covers it, “Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” A bunch of Psalms begin with, “O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.”
Tonight, I’m going to talk about gratitude, but within the context of the 1998 Japanese movie After Life. It’s a really great movie, but it’s not easy to find. The DVD is out of print. You can watch it on the Criterion Channel if you subscribe to that. I’ve never seen a dubbed version, only subtitles. There’s a lot of talking so there’s a lot of reading.
As the movie opens, we learn that when you die, you are transported to an industrial dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. Specifically, an abandoned school in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture. Now, don’t worry about the theology or mechanics or anything like that. Let’s focus on your one task.
Your one task is to select the single memory that you will take with you into the next existence. Everything else will be forgotten.
Counselors work with the recently deceased to settle on one memory. Once identified, the memory is recreated and filmed. The recreations are very crude, with cardboard and fabric scenery, and cotton ball clouds. Clearly the focus is the memory itself. When finished, the subject sits in a small movie theater holding a film canister, surrounded by the counselors and production crew. They all watch the film, and when the lights come up the subject’s seat is empty. The movie follows several people through this process of recollection, discernment, and production.
Which of your memories would you choose?
You probably started thinking about it a couple paragraphs ago. For some, the question of which memory you’d carry with you is easy, with one standing head and shoulders above the rest. For others, what might be the obvious memory is eclipsed by another that is more meaningful when you think more about it. For most, it’s hard to pick just one.
And that brings me back to gratitude. I have many, many memories to choose from, and to pick just one would be difficult.
I’m grateful that this is such a very hard question.
I am thankful for every one of those extraordinary experiences and cherished moments. No doubt you are as well. Have you thought of the one memory that you would take with you? Or several?
It’s a tradition at GPC that whoever is doing the Children’s Message prays at the end by saying a few words and the children repeating them. I ended my devotional time in that way with the assembled group:
Dear God … Thank you … Amen.
