Forget not all his benefits

"Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." Psalm 103:1-2

David is not speaking to God here. He is speaking to his own soul. He gives it an order. And he repeats the order, because once is evidently not enough.

That is something we do too little of, and should relearn: addressing yourself instead of listening to yourself. Our soul talks to us all day — commenting, fearing, comparing. Most of the time we believe it. David does the opposite: he takes it in hand.

"All that is within me, bless." Not only the mouth. There are parts of us that do not bless: the memory that chews things over, the will that drags, the imagination that manufactures disasters. David summons them all. Whole praise is a work of gathering.

Then comes the most concrete instruction in the psalm: "forget not all his benefits." It is a command against forgetting, and it should be taken seriously, because forgetting is not neutral. We forget good far faster than we forget harm — that is how we are built, and it warps the view. After a few months, a life in which God intervened twenty times looks like a life in which nothing happened.

This is why Scripture insists so heavily on memorials: standing stones, feasts, stories retold to children. That is not nostalgia. It is memory maintenance, because unmaintained memory always thins out in the same direction.

Today. Take a notebook — a real one, paper — and write down five benefits received this year. Date them. Do not hunt for the big ones; the small ones are the ones that vanish fastest. Keep the notebook and add a line each week.

The day you go through something hard, that notebook will be worth more than anything I could write here.

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