Memories...

I find myself, and indeed have found myself, missing people lately. People I used to be around, people I wish I could be around more frequently... At any rate, I was thinking about memories and their place in our lives, even our hearts... 

I am starting to forget what it is truly like to be with you. To bask in your presence. To absorb your smile, your scent, your very being. It is an odd and scary feeling. It is like trying to remember what vanilla ice cream tastes like. I cannot describe it, but I know that I like it. I cannot accurately compare it to anything except itself. If I were to have it again, I know I would recognize it immediately and enjoy it just as I always have, but in its absence the memory becomes somewhat hollow. It all starts to feel imaginary, too good to be true. Did any of it really happen? Was it really as I recall? Could I have been as happy as I remember being? Was there really nothing else like it? Is my memory turning into a dream? Was it really as I remember? Or are my memories a mix of truth, idealism, fantasy and simple good thoughts/feelings/longings? Questions I am left with, without the means to answer them.

CS Lewis wrote about this in "A Grief Observed". It got the wheels turning, something it appears it is easy to do...

The sin/pride in me emerges more then I have even noticed in the past... some out-loud thoughts...

Why is it so easy for me to see pride and sin and "shortcomings" in other people? Why is that what I notice, what I recall, what springs to mind when I think of someone else? Is it because I am so depraved myself that I take some sort of solace in knowledge that I am not the only one? How sick is this humanity that encases my soul!

Lord, I need eyes like Yours. Not necessarily ones that do not see the sin, but ones that can look past it. Eyes, that can see Your created beauty and love in spite of the stains that we have created on ourselves...