The Wright Place: Nourish ~ Hide It In Your Heart

Welcome to Nourish: 31 Days of Family, Food, and Faith. This is Day 30! To see the rest of the series click here.

I have always been a great memorizer. As a child I remember learning lines in plays with relative ease. I memorized science definitions and French verb derivations. I memorized boys phone numbers, the cable line up for our local TV…just like you did, I’m sure.

These days I’m still memorizing BUT IT’S SO MUCH MORE DIFFICULT!! Somewhere along the way I’ve picked up a handicap or two in the memorizing arena and I’m pretty sure I can name those handicaps “AGE” and “LIFE.” Still, some things are easier to tuck into the folds of my brain than others, recipes stick well because something in me knows that a recipe put to mind reaps wonderful benefits of speed, planning, and execution. The church secretary at our former church (which had a membership of well over 600) knew by heart every phone number of every member. She too was working against age and life, yet the need for that particular set of information in her daily work made it second nature to her.

I make my children memorize all sorts of things. Right now we are working on various poems and Romans 8 and the little girls work each week on a set of verses for AWANA at our church.

One might ask why in this world of immediately available information does anyone need to memorize anything? Why not just rely on Google? Can’t we just look it up instead of spending all that time memorizing?

My answer is: “Yes indeed. Look up all of the information you want. Google till you’ve flattened your fingerprints…but also…memorize stuff please.”

Much information has been gathered about the benefits of memorization both to the brain and to the soul.

There is perhaps no greater tool than memorization to seal language patterns into a human brain, and there is perhaps nothing more effective than poetry to provide exactly what we want: reliably correct and sophisticated language patterns. Although rote memorization and recitation went out of vogue when the great god of Creativity began to dominate ideology in the Schools of Education, it has stood for centuries, even millennia, as the most powerful way to teach, to learn, to develop skills, and to preserve knowledge. By memorizing and reciting, you practically fuse neurons into permanent language storage patterns. Those patterns are then ready to be used, combined, adapted, and applied to express ideas in a myriad of ways. ~Andrew Pudewa, One Myth, Two Truths

When we memorize the brain is strengthened. When we memorize we fill our heart with beauty and goodness and we gain confidence in our mind. When we memorize, we keep the brain that God gave us in the best shape possible and with that fit mind we can better serve Him…much better serve Him!

Everyone has his or her own way of going about getting words from the page to the brain. My favorite way is to place what I’m trying to memorize in front of me while I’m doing brainless activity…I have Romans 8 hanging in my shower and I have written it on my mirror in the bathroom with a wet erase marker. The former works great, the latter tends to fade with the steam from the shower!

I know in moments of great stress or at times when I can’t get my mind to calm and move on to a “better place” I’m always glad to have some of the Word in there because the mere calling of it to my mind does great things to calm and nourish my soul.

For more information about the benefits and some "how to" tips memorization check out the following links:

Famous Poet Billy Collins tells how a poem committed to memory saved his sanity during an MRI...

I’m not a claustrophobe, but you don’t need to be to feel claustrophobic inside an MRI. It’s like being buried alive. I lay there with my eyes closed, and pulled “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” up in my memory. I pulled the whole poem up before me in my mind. Slowly, I started reciting it. And then more slowly. After saying it straight through a number of times, I used the poem as a kind of diagram to focus on. I said just the rhyme words: tree / made, bee / glade, slow / sing, glow / wing, like that. Then I tried to say every other line. By the time the MRI was over, I was in the process of saying it backwards. And the poem—like a good companion—had saved me from really freaking out. {The rest of the article HERE.}