Ten Years Old: Remember

With these spectacular fireworks to help me, I'm throwing a party tonight!

Although I don't know where they were displayed originally, I'm borrowing this photo from National Geographic in order to ...

 Celebrate my blog's tenth birthday today!

Ten years ago I was reading in Deuteronomy and came across chapter eight where it talks about not forgetting the Lord. Over and over it says, "Remember ... how he led you, how he humbled you, how he tested you, how he provided for you, how he cared for you ... "

And then it came to a strong warning in verse 10: "When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God ... then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God". And it goes on with an even stronger warning of what will happen if you DO forget.

This struck me like a bolt of lightening. I knew that I was in danger of forgetting the Lord.

At that time God was doing so much for us. Yet I was forgetting the details. With everyday life speeding along faster than ever, I was losing sight of what God was providing, teaching, blessing, humbling and leading us in.

This made me stop and ponder what my response should be.

A fellow JV teammate told me he had set up a blog as a way to record what he was learning, so I thought perhaps I could do something similar in order to help me remember the Lord and all He was doing.

So on this day ten years ago, September 5, 2006, I asked our son, Tyler, 16 at the time, to help me figure out how to set it up. I had absolutely no idea where to begin. Thankfully he did.

We talked about what to name my blog, and it was him who came up with it. Based on the mountain peak that I see out of my office window, "Lysá hora", it seemed appropriate to call it "Living By Lysa" since so much of life was happening in the shadow of that mountain. I typed my first post, pushed "publish", and my blog began.

Slow in its beginnings, I wrote 235 blog posts over the next five years. That's not many! It only averages out to 46 per year, or a little less than one a week.

As 2010 came to a close I realized I was at a crossroads after five years of blogging. If I was really serious about this commitment to "remember", I knew I'd have to do something different than what I'd been doing.

After much thought, I decided that for one year I would try to write four posts a week, as a commitment to the Lord.

At first it was hard to make that happen. Often I'd realize that I hadn't written anything for several days so would start writing after saying goodnight to the kids. I'm pretty sure they have memories of hearing the "clack-clack" of my keyboard while they drifted off to sleep in their rooms nearby. But by the end of that year I'd written 221 posts, almost as many as I'd written in the previous five years!

I don't think that year was any fuller of God's work in our lives than any other year. But because I had made a point to record and remember, I felt it was a more amazing year than ever. And found myself eager to continue recording those remembrances.

From that point on I never looked back. Blogging became my joy-filled delight in fulfilling God's Word to "remember."

Ten years down the road, I now have 1,724 posts of remembering Him in every aspect of our lives.
And I'm still motivated to keep watching for more of Him in our daily lives, whether that be for the big or small things. I find myself looking for Him every day, and finding Him every time I look!

There are many things that I'd like to be remembered for after I'm gone to be with the Lord: "She was a loving wife, a nurturing mom, a kind friend, a prayer warrior, and a faith-filled woman of God", to name a few.

But if I had to hope for what the Lord would say it would be this: "She remembered ME."

So, with virtual fireworks going off above me, I lift a toast to the Lord and say, "Here's to at least another ten years, maybe even twenty or thirty, of remembering YOU and all you've done, and sharing it with others!!"

CHEERS to Him and to all the remembrances of His work and presence in our lives!