Do we all forget the bad?

Sunday night we (I have returned to my 6:00 p.m. Refinery service, much to my own relief) started a series on Judges.  No, not Judy, Wapner, or Joe Brown, but Shamgar, Deborah, Jephthah, and Samson (to name a few).  Now, I’m not highly familiar with Judges, save for Samson’s epic 1000 kill streak with a donkey’s jawbone, so it’s going to be a great series.  It not only gives me a reason to look closer at a book I have actually overlook and skipped plenty of times, but it also gives me a chance to jump back into home with a series based around a book of the bible, not a book with some jibba-jabba of how hell is empty.

The last part was a joke.  I’m a humorous, remember?

Well, during our intro to Judges, Pastor John talked about how Israel got into this downward spiral of falling away from God, going back to God, and falling away from God, each time getting progressively worse, instead of progressively better.  He said Israel fell into the habits they had gotten use to, forgot how they screwed up before, and continued to screw up, finally calling for help, which God gave in for of a Judge, and then they were back doing things all over again, but this time much worse than the generation before.  A lot of this had to do with Israel forgetting its past, because we have a tendency to forget the bad stuff that happens in our past.

I thought about that for a moment and let it slide by, but then I really started to think about that statement.  Maybe it was because I don’t have a lot of happy memories, or because I may be mentally unstable, but I remember my bad memories, I remember a lot of them, and to be blunt, it makes me a little worried.

Childhoods should be happy, no doubt about that, and to think there are a lot of happy memories, most of mine are slightly dark and depressing.  I have a few happy memories, and those mostly have to do with me being alone, and then that’s where it gets dark.

Israel had it rough.  They were slaves, brought out of Egypt by a guy with a stutter claiming to be lead by the almighty God.  If I was Israel, I’d try to hold onto the good times too.  The Red Sea, and the Mana, or the time Moses came off the mountain and saw us partying and broke those giant tablets he was carrying.  Man, that was a good party.

Israel is like a child hiding from its past.  It doesn’t want to remember what happened, so it holds onto the good stuff to make it through, and then when it hits the fan (you know what “it” is), they plead with God, who is ever loving, and He smiles on them, giving them a Judge to smite their enemies, and get business in order.

I’m not sure when God is sending me my own Samson to smite my enemies, and yes, I know Jesus was that Judge (stop with the Jesus Jukes, okay?) but you know, sometimes we just need a smiter to smite those worth smiting...

Growing up, I had a smiter.  His name was Ricky, and for the record he was in fact a stuffed raccoon.  Not like a taxidermist stuffed raccoon, but a cute cartoony stuffed animal kind.  He smited the darkness, the things that went bump in the night, the horrible days of school, the lousy games of t-ball, the nightmares, the what evers; Ricky was my Judge.  He lost an eye during a battle with my older cousin, and I still remember that night, like all the other dark memories.

I don’t too often think back to my childhood.  Mainly because, try as I might to think of the good things, I come up short.  That doesn’t keep me holding onto the good times and forcing my subconscious to push back the bad.  The good times are in deep contrast to the bad times, and do remind me there was a decent enough childhood that I didn’t end up a serial killer, or something worse... like a scientologist... or even more so worse... a universalist...