Day 22 – Joy Found and Remembered

I saw the copper color on the carpet and thought, “penny on heads, yay!”

Instead, it was a piece of cereal, a circle shaped flake.

When I read the parable of the lost coin, I can see myself as the widow. She’s searching every corner, maybe like me had to find her glasses or maybe she resorted to rubbing her hand along the floors, the corners, the spaces where the coin may have landed.

“Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

‭‭Luke‬ ‭15‬:‭8‬-‭10‬ ‭ESV‬‬

I’ve lost many things. I’m sad because a pair of earrings disappeared (twice, one time I found them) and I can’t find the one charm for my bracelet. It’s long lost.

More than those treasures though is the mystery that many events and interactions in my life, I have no recall.

No memory.

Someone told me after all these years, willing myself to remember, sitting in silence trying to recalibrate my brain,

That complex PTSD often results in memory loss. A chronology of hurt has this result.

Now, you may think this is heavy, sad, upsetting, even depressing.

No, it’s a gift, a joy to know that life is an invitation to simply cling to the joyful and to make more joy, if you can.

So, what is joy?

What is found treasure?

It’s found in listening.

Acceptance of every tiny moment.

It’s found in observing. It’s the evidence that who you are now is so much more important than who you were or what hard things happened to steal chunks of remembering.

The widow in the parable rejoiced.

Was it because she was poor?

Was it because she simply celebrated her not giving up her search?

Or even more, because she realized the essence of the truth of Jesus.

She mattered.

She was not one who’d ever be given up on.

Nor am I.

Nor are you.

I know the parable is about Jesus caring about every single lost soul.

To me it’s about joy.

About never giving up on being found by it and by it finding you.

I’m 63 years old with a timeline of trauma. But, not until today did someone say to me, the memory loss is because of what happened to you, it’s really just brain chemistry, neuroscience.

And the truth of that felt like a coin I’d been crawling around on my knees, scouring the floor to see

For a very long time.

Trying to squeeze the memories from the layers of my brain and all for naught.

Except the realization of the present and the chance to add to memories.

God is so good to me.

I surely don’t deserve it.

There are countless things I’ve agonized over not being able to remember.

I’ll never find those memories.

Maybe, though I can feel deeply the way those crises and celebrations made me feel and I can honor those times and myself by feeling all the feelings now.

Found, not lost at all.