[This is one in a series of mid-week Reflections published by Horley Baptist Church during August 2020]
Each Sunday morning on HBC-Online we enjoy the sound and sight of, generally, younger members of the church family reciting their memory verses. Well done to you all! My kids don’t do memory verses – the silly billies just keep bleating for their nanny. But that’s the sort of behaviour that one might expect from a couple of young goats.
In my early twenties I had a mentor, an older man who had been trained by Rolls Royce to work on their wartime aero engines. As part of his training he was taught never to memorise any critical measurements. Rather, he should take a pencil and a piece of paper to the instruction manual and write down the figure that he needed, every time. Such a practice makes good sense when a Spitfire pilot’s life and, potentially, the outcome of a battle might depend upon the accuracy of your work.
In contrast, there are many situations in life when being able to remember some detail is essential. The colours of traffic lights are an example of a collective memory – you need to know them but, if you forget, almost anybody could remind you. However, if you forget a PIN or a password then, theoretically at least, nobody can help you.
What about Bible memory verses? On the one hand, they are available to everybody but, on the other hand, many of them speak to us in a deeply personal way. Most of us who were brought up in a church-going family would have been, to a lesser or greater extent, encouraged to memorise Bible verses. It can seem like a chore but it is much easier when you are young and can develop the habit without have to clear out other debris first. Undoubtedly, there are benefits to come in later life.
In preparing these reflections there have frequently come to mind snippets of verses that I recall (not necessarily accurately) from years past. Unlike previous generations of Bible scholars, we now have the tools with which to verify those memories, to put them into context, to find parallel passages and even to relate to secular information sources. But that would be impossible without the ‘snippets’ in the first place. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing but without it we would not know that we don’t know what we don’t know!
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Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © the Author
