when i knew you...

amnesia has always been an intriguing thing to me i can't imagine just forgetting everything you knew...or even a significant part of it. i get frustrated when i can't remember a name or song title or something, so forgetting it all has gotta suck.

i remember (thank God!) watching The Notebook and thinking how hard that situation would be on both parties. maybe the woman with alzheimers doesn't ever notice that she doesn't remember. maybe she's just in this place of getting through each day. maybe she's not really all that frustrated because she doesn't know what she's forgotten.

but the husband? how difficult must that be? what kind of love prompts someone to continue to try bringing back the one that once loved back? how many times had he read that story to her? how many times did she get a glimpse of their former glory? the passion and history that once bonded the two as one?

well, i was thinking the other day on something i've heard my whole life. in jeremiah 1 it says that before we were formed in the womb God knew us. i used to sort of dismiss that as He knew about us. had a blueprint somewhere on the wall for when it came time to put cells together. but yesterday i was thinking...what if He KNEW us? and now we're here in these human bodies and we've forgotten what it's like to be known? i mean, we fight our whole lives to be known...to know ourselves, or to find someone that knows us. we use not being known by someone as a way to remind them of the distance they actually are from us. we long to be known.

what if the part of each of us that knows there is a God in pursuit of us is like that woman from The Notebook? we'd be unaware of the depth of love we've forgotten. we'd get weary trying to fight through the cloudy haze that always seemed to cover whatever parts of us were aware. and wouldn't we seem to be empty...nearly shells of what it seems we were made to be?

wouldn't the husband long to see the amnesia go away? wouldn't He do anything to bring His bride out of it? wouldn't He tell His love story in the hopes that one day the faded, foggy, and lost memories would be lifted and His love would be returned fully by one who knew Him?

i wonder if there's not something deep inside us that knows...and just needs to hear the story over and over again to be reminded...being known is possible. it's already happened. we've just forgotten...