January 2

Remember that these forty years the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness, so that He might humble you and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commandments. — Deut 8:2 BSB

Memory is an amazing thing. It’s like a vault where we store the experiences of our lives. An invisible hand records everything—what we do, think, and feel. We are the authors of our own memories, writing our own life stories.

There’s a story about children being told that the sound they hear when holding a seashell to their ear is the echo of the sea, a reminder of the days when the shell lay on the shore. In a similar way, the sounds we hear in our hearts as life goes on are the echoes of our past. If we want those echoes to be beautiful, harmonious, and uplifting, we must live our lives beautifully, purely, unselfishly, and helpfully. Mistakes and sins in youth can create painful memories later on. The secret to a happy old age is living well, carefully, and thoughtfully from the very beginning. Any careless moment can leave a mark that saddens the years to come.