What Have You Been Steeping In?

REMEMBER

What Have You Been Steeping In?

"And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory..."2 Corinthians 3:18

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to remember the painful things than the goodness of God?

That question has been following me around for months.

Not long ago, I was driving to Grand Rapids when an old conversation quietly began replaying in my mind. At first, it felt like I was simply remembering my mom. Earlier this year, after a long hospital stay and a difficult fall, I had moved her to Holland so I could be closer to her. I wanted to see her every day, help manage her care, and make the most of whatever time we had left together.

But somewhere along that drive, remembering turned into rehearsing.

"Mom, I moved you because I wanted to be with you. But then you died. What if moving you made everything worse? Why does it still feel like it was my fault? Should I have left you where you were?"

For nearly twenty-five minutes, my mind stayed trapped in those questions. I replayed every decision, carried the weight of responsibility, and searched for certainty where none could be found. The more I replayed the story, the heavier it became. Without realizing it, I was allowing questions I could never answer to define me.

Then, almost as quietly as the conversation had begun, I sensed the Lord interrupting my thoughts. He didn't shame me for where my mind had wandered. He didn't tell me to try harder or think differently. He simply invited me somewhere else.

"Remember Me. Steep in Me."

Those four words stopped me.

I turned my attention away from the conversation I had been having with myself and back toward Jesus. I remembered His goodness, His faithfulness, and His love. I remembered that He had been with me through every hospital visit, every difficult decision, and every goodbye. Most of all, I remembered that His love for me had never depended on whether I had made every perfect decision.

In that moment, I realized something I needed to hear all over again.

Perfection was never the goal. He was.

A Pattern I Had Never Noticed

The memory that still catches in my throat happened when I was in middle school. One evening, after saying the wrong thing, I was told to leave the house. I don't even remember what I said anymore. What I remember is walking out the door and wondering where I was supposed to go.

I didn't want to knock on a friend's door and tell them I had been kicked out of my house. The thought of saying those words out loud felt almost as painful as leaving. I was embarrassed, and I didn't want anyone to know what life was really like inside our home.

So I walked to my friend's house, but instead of going inside, I climbed a tree in their backyard.

It was nighttime, and I was scared. Somehow, sitting in that tree made me feel safer because I could see if anyone was coming. If someone wanted to hurt me, I would at least see them first. Looking back now, I realize how heartbreaking that picture is—a middle-school girl sitting alone in a tree because she didn't know where else to go, believing that the safest place she could find was a branch in someone else's backyard.

Without realizing it, I was forming beliefs that would shape me for decades. I began believing that safety depended on performance. If I could say the right thing, make the right decisions, work a little harder, keep everyone happy, and avoid making mistakes, maybe everything would be okay. Those beliefs quietly followed me into adulthood. They shaped the way I viewed myself, the way I related to other people, and eventually, the way I related to God.

Those moments seemed ordinary at the time, but together they taught me something I carried into adulthood: my value, and even my safety, depended on getting everything right.

Without realizing it, I developed well-worn pathways in my thinking. Whenever something difficult happened, I instinctively replayed it, analyzed it, and searched for where I had gone wrong. If I could just identify my mistake, perhaps I could prevent the next disappointment or avoid the next loss.

Eventually, I projected that same way of thinking onto God.

I would never have said it out loud, but somewhere deep inside I believed that God's blessing depended on my performance. If I prayed enough, obeyed enough, and made the right decisions, surely He would bless me. But if I got it wrong, perhaps He would withhold His guidance, His wisdom, or His favor until I figured it out.

Maybe your story is different. Perhaps you don't replay conversations. Maybe you replay regrets. Maybe you carry shame over a decision you made years ago, or you find yourself constantly worrying about a future you cannot control.

Whatever the details, I think many of us share the same tendency. Our minds naturally rehearse what wounds us while quietly forgetting the goodness of God.

That is why remembering matters.

What Are You Steeping In?

At our July Gather, we used a simple illustration that has stayed with me ever since. We dropped a tea bag into a cup of hot water and simply watched.

At first, almost nothing happened.

But slowly, the water began to change. It took on the tea's color, its fragrance, and eventually its flavor. The transformation was gradual, almost imperceptible, until the water became like whatever it had been steeping in.

Our hearts work much the same way.

Every day we are steeping in something. We steep in our thoughts, our worries, our schedules, our conversations, the news we consume, the opinions of others, God's Word, and His presence. The question isn't whether we are being shaped. The question is what is shaping us.

Paul writes, "And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory..." (2 Corinthians 3:18).

That verse has become one of my favorites because it reminds me that transformation doesn't begin with trying harder. It begins with beholding. The more we intentionally turn our attention toward Jesus; His goodness, His faithfulness, His character...the more our hearts slowly begin to reflect His.

We become what we behold.

David Remembered

We become what we behold.

David understood that long before Paul ever wrote those words.

When we read the Psalms, we discover that David didn't pretend life was easy. He wrote honestly about fear, disappointment, waiting, betrayal, and failure. Yet woven throughout those same Psalms is another pattern: David intentionally remembered. Again and again, he rehearsed God's faithfulness, not because God needed reminding, but because David did.

Psalm 40 is one of my favorite examples. David writes,

"I waited patiently for the Lord; He turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God."

Before David looked ahead to what God might do, he looked back and remembered what God had already done. Remembering anchored his heart in the middle of uncertainty. It reminded him that the God who had been faithful before would be faithful again.

Even after his devastating failure with Bathsheba, David eventually stopped running and turned back to God. His prayer in Psalm 51 wasn't the prayer of a man trying to earn his way back into God's favor. It was the prayer of someone who trusted that God's mercy was greater than his failure. He finally stopped hiding and returned to the God he had known all along.

Perhaps that's why Scripture calls David a man after God's own heart. It wasn't because he lived a flawless life. It was because, no matter how far he wandered, he kept returning.

The Father Who Runs

David wasn't the only one who understood the power of returning.

Jesus painted the same picture in one of the most familiar stories in Scripture.

The prodigal son rehearsed the speech he planned to give his father all the way home. He expected rejection. He expected consequences. He expected to earn his place back in the family.

Instead, Jesus tells us that "while he was still a long way off, his father ran to him with open arms" his father saw him, was filled with compassion, and ran to him.

The son hadn't cleaned himself up. He hadn't finished apologizing. He hadn't proven he had changed. Before the son could do anything to restore the relationship, the father had already crossed the distance between them.

I wonder if that's one of the hardest truths for us to believe.

Like the prodigal son, we often assume God is waiting for us to get everything together before He welcomes us home. We imagine Him standing at a distance with crossed arms, waiting to see if we've changed enough to deserve another chance.

But that isn't the picture Jesus gives us.

He gives us a Father who runs.

A Father whose love isn't earned by our performance but flows from His character. A Father who doesn't wait for us to become worthy before moving toward us. He runs while we are still a long way off.

That is the God we are remembering.

A New Way to Remember

Remembering isn't a memory problem.

It's an attention problem.

Left to ourselves, our attention naturally drifts toward fear, regret, disappointment, and uncertainty. Remembering God's goodness requires us to gently turn our attention back toward Him again and again.

When we're carrying grief, anxiety, or fear, our bodies often move into survival mode. Stress hormones flood our system, making it difficult to slow down, think clearly, or recognize God's presence. In those moments, gratitude becomes much more than positive thinking. It becomes a spiritual practice that gently interrupts our anxious thoughts and creates space to become present with God.

One of the simplest practices I've adopted is asking a single question at the end of each day:

Where did I see God's goodness today?

Sometimes the answer is significant. More often, it's beautifully ordinary, a conversation that encouraged me, a verse that met me exactly where I needed it, an unexpected kindness, the beauty of creation, or simply the quiet awareness that God was with me in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

Those moments have become what I call my Love Notes from God. They are simple reminders that God has been present all along, even on the days I almost missed Him. Over time, they have slowly changed the way I see my life. My circumstances haven't always changed, but my attention has. And as my attention has changed, so has my heart.

I've come to believe that what blooms from our lives is often the result of what we've been steeping in.

A Practice of Remembering

One of the beautiful things I've discovered is that remembering becomes easier when we give ourselves a place to remember.

After that drive to Grand Rapids, I realized I didn't want God's goodness to remain a fleeting thought that I would forget by the next day. I wanted to create a simple rhythm that would help me notice Him in the ordinary moments of life. That desire eventually became what I now call Love Notes from God.

Each evening, I ask myself one simple question:

Where did I see God's goodness today?

Some days the answer fills a page. Other days it's just a single sentence. Sometimes it's an answered prayer or a meaningful conversation. Other times it's the quiet beauty of a sunrise, a verse that met me at exactly the right moment, or simply the assurance that God was with me in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

None of those moments seem extraordinary by themselves. Yet over time they become a record of God's faithfulness. They remind me that God has been writing a story of grace all along, even when I couldn't see it.

That's why we created the Love Notes from God Journal Create Kit. It isn't simply a craft project or another journal to fill. It's an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and cultivate the habit of remembering. As you paint the teacup and flowers, you're creating more than a beautiful journal cover. You're creating a place to collect the evidence of God's presence in your life.

If you'd like to begin this practice, we'd love to have you join us. Click on the link below to purchase the Love Notes from God Create Kit

Click Me

Remember

The older I get, the more convinced I become that spiritual transformation rarely happens in dramatic moments. More often, it happens quietly, one ordinary day at a time, as we learn to pay attention to the God who has been with us all along.

That morning on the drive to Grand Rapids, nothing about my circumstances changed. My mom was still gone. The questions I couldn't answer were still unanswered.

What changed was where I chose to place my attention.

Instead of steeping in regret, I began remembering God's goodness.

Instead of rehearsing my failures, I began rehearsing His faithfulness.

Instead of trying to earn what had already been freely given, I simply returned.

Because we become what we behold.

What blooms from our lives is often the result of what we've been steeping in.

My prayer is that, as you learn to remember God's goodness, you'll discover what I'm still learning every day, that He has been far closer than you realized all along.

And perhaps, in the quiet practice of remembering, you'll hear Him whisper the same invitation He whispered to me that morning on the drive to Grand Rapids:

"Remember Me. Steep in Me."