jmgoyder

The heartbreaking description of a person with Alzheimer’s disease illustrates what a precious thing we have in the gift of memory. Memory gives us a past and enables us to plan for a future. We enjoy routines in our daily cycle and retrace our steps. Without memory, all we have is the present – no more. Everybody is a stranger. Calendars don’t make sense. Even mirrors are confusing, because there is somebody else here in the room.

Ecclesiastes 12:1 suggests that we should remember our Creator when we are young, because days of trouble will come. The implication is that we will forget even our God. Declining mental abilities are well-known symptoms of increasing age. In 1906 Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German physician, did a brain autopsy on one of his elderly patients who had died after years of severe memory problems. He was surprised to find tangled nerve cells…