Cyndi and I are building a log home. As each log was placed during the first stage, I picture an old story coming to life through the grain—an ancient, steady, and deeply human tale. There’s a sense of nostalgia that makes you imagine pioneers carving out a life in the wilderness, gathered around a fire while snow falls softly outside.
It’s a beautiful picture. But as I learned more about the origins of log homes, I’ve realized that what we call nostalgia often smooths over the rough edges of memory.
The first log homes were not built for charm. They were born out of necessity — crafted by settlers who had more courage than comfort, more endurance than luxury. In the 1600s, Swedish and Finnish immigrants brought this building tradition to North America, using what the land gave them: timber, tools, and time. The thick logs kept out the cold and stood against the wind, a simple technology of survival. But these homes also trapped smoke, leaked heat, and demanded endless maintenance. Life in them was rough, unpredictable, and often lonely.
Nostalgia remembers the hearth; memory recalls the hardship.
And yet, there’s something redemptive about remembering both the hearth and the hardship. Today’s log homes are far different from those early structures — not because we’ve abandoned the past, but because we’ve learned from it. Modern builders have kept the wisdom of the old ways — the strength, sustainability, and simplicity — while applying what time and experience have taught us: better materials, stronger seals, safer designs. That’s what true memory does. It preserves what matters and redeems what was broken. It honors the past not by romanticizing it, but by letting it teach us how to live more faithfully in the present.
On the other hand, there’s a strange comfort in forgetting. Forgetting helps us move past what hurts, gloss over what shames us, and escape what demands change. But the comfort is shallow and temporary. When we forget our history, our pain, and our promises, we lose something sacred. We lose awareness. We lose compassion. We lose the thread that ties us to one another and to God’s redemptive work.
Nostalgia doesn’t respect memory, but it still draws us in, similar to forgetting but potentially more damaging. Nostalgia creates a false story that only shows the good parts of the past, hiding the failures—though not always consciously.
We live in a culture of amnesia. Our news cycles are shorter than ever. Yesterday’s outrage vanishes by morning. And we live in an age where nostalgia has become a sales tactic, a political slogan, and a weapon. An alluring story we tell ourselves about a past that feels safer, cleaner, simpler.
But nostalgia, unlike true memory, is not faithful to truth. It is selective, cosmetic, and seductive. It turns history into a lullaby that keeps us asleep. Memory, by contrast, keeps us awake. It demands honesty. It holds both the beauty and the pain of what was so that we can be alert to what is—and faithful to what can be.
Political scholar Tinatin Japaridze, writing for the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, compares and contrasts the current leaders of the U.S. and Russia, two of the most powerful global figures, and how they use nostalgia to gain support. She warns that instead of presenting a realistic, hopeful future, “the powerful narratives crafted by political ‘nostalgists’ can hinder society’s ability to envision a future built on present realities.”
Our current administration is recycling nostalgia, labeling it as “make America great again,” and rewriting parts of our shared history that remind us why we should steer clear of the direction they want to take us. The very idea behind the movement taps into a longing for a supposed era of American “greatness” in the “good old days,” sparking pride and desire while hiding realities such as racial injustice, inequality, and environmental consciousness.
Japaridze goes on to note that “the belief that the past was superior to the present and that the only path forward is to revert to earlier times poses a tangible risk of national decline.”
Her words expose more than political rhetoric; they diagnose a spiritual illness. When people lose the courage to face the present, they take refuge in a past that never was. Nostalgia becomes a kind of idolatry—an emotional Egypt we keep wandering back toward. We then find ourselves retreating to the comforting, yet often illusory, embrace of a past that never truly existed and the darkness of an uncertain future.
Families fracture under the weight of unspoken stories. Communities forget the shoulders they stand on. Even churches can be tempted to skip over the more difficult parts of our story, including the wounds, the injustices, and the failures of courage. Forgetting feels easier than facing the discomfort of memory. But when we forget, we fall asleep to the truth of who we are.
Her warning is prophetic, and it echoes one of Scripture’s oldest commands: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you…” (Deuteronomy 8:2). In this ancient directive, remembering is not a sentimental exercise—it is a divine mandate. Don’t just remember the victories, but also remember the hunger, the mistakes, the moments when faith nearly failed. God wanted His people to remember the whole journey — because in their remembering, they would stay humble, grateful, and faithful.
As the Israelites faced the harsh realities of their escape from captivity, nostalgia kept them chained to Egypt. But God urged them to remember that they were once slaves, freed by God’s grace and led through the hardships to a promised land. But nostalgia crept in even then. They longed for Egypt — not the chains, not the cruelty, but the taste of meat and onions by the fire. They remembered comfort and forgot captivity. They wanted to go back, not forward. Nostalgia made them forget who they were and whose they were.
To remember is to resist the falsehood of nostalgia. To remember is to honor both the pain and the promise that shape us. Forgetting, by contrast, is how injustice repeats itself, how fear finds its footing again.
In this week’s pages from our companion book, Gilead, Reverend Ames wrestles with his family’s divided legacy. A grandfather who carried a gun for abolition and a father who renounced violence altogether. Between them stands Ames, trying to reconcile zeal and peace, justice and grace. His story mirrors ours: the tension between what we inherit and what we choose.
Each of us carries a story we would rather not remember — personal, familial, or cultural. Yet memory, when held in the light of God’s mercy, becomes sacred ground for transformation.
Memory is a part of being woke and a biblical mandate. The command to remember runs like a golden thread through the story of God’s people. Biblical remembrance is never passive. It’s not nostalgia—it’s an act of faith. To remember is to bring God’s past faithfulness into the present moment. It’s how the people of God stay rooted when everything else feels transient and loud.
If Jesus were to speak directly to our age of distraction, perhaps he would say: “Stay awake to the story that made you. Stay awake to the pain you’d rather not see. Stay awake to the love that refuses to die.” That’s what remembrance looks like in a restless world—it’s holy attentiveness.
Imagine what would happen if we truly practiced remembrance as a community of faith. If we remembered the courage of those who fought for freedom and justice, we might find new strength to confront racism and poverty today. If we remembered our own seasons of doubt, we might offer gentler grace to those still searching. If we remembered what it felt like to be forgiven, we might become less judgmental and more merciful.
Memory transforms us because it roots us in truth — and truth, as Jesus said, sets us free. When a people forget their story, they lose their soul. But when we remember in the light of Christ, our stories become part of God’s ongoing redemption.
This week, take time to remember. Not just the pleasant parts of your story, but the parts that still ache. Sit with them. Name them before God. Ask what they might still be teaching you about love, humility, or justice. Reach out to someone who carries a different story — a neighbor, a coworker, an elder in your family — and listen without defending or correcting. Let their story expand your own.
Because memory keeps us awake — awake to compassion, awake to gratitude, awake to God’s continuing work, maybe that’s what it means, in the truest sense, to say that Jesus was woke: He remembered — every name, every wound, every promise — and He refused to fall asleep to the suffering or beauty of this world. There’s a kind of remembering that heals, and there’s a kind that harms. And it’s easy to confuse the two.
Then Jesus took a piece of bread, gave thanks to God, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in memory of me.
Luke 22:14-22
When God calls us to remember, it is not to make us sentimental — it is to make us awake. Memory, in Scripture, is not a wistful glance backward; it is a moral act that ties our past to our present calling. But nostalgia — that longing for “the good old days” — is a counterfeit memory. It selects only the parts of the past that comfort us, sweeping pain and failure out of sight. It feels harmless, but it quietly blinds us to truth.
In our time, nostalgia has become one of the most dangerous spiritual temptations — not just personally, but nationally. We’ve seen it packaged and sold in slogans that promise to “make things great again,” while rewriting or erasing the parts of history that challenge our pride. Nostalgia is memory without repentance.
When we sanitize the past, we risk repeating it. The Bible isn’t a collection of feel-good stories — it’s a record of human drama lived out before a faithful God. Scripture remembers the betrayals, the failures, the regrets — not to shame us, but to keep us awake to the truth that grace has always been greater than our forgetfulness.
Memory keeps us awake. Nostalgia puts us to sleep.
The Table of Memory
Centuries after God led the Israelites out of slavery, Jesus gathered his disciples for what would be His final meal with them before He was arrested and executed. Luke tells us Jesus took a piece of bread, gave thanks to God, broke it, and gave it to His friends, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in memory of me.”
This was not a call to mere ritual — it was a command to stay awake. To remember who Jesus was, what He did, and why it mattered. And in that room sat Judas — a living reminder that betrayal, greed, and human frailty are part of the story too. Although Jesus knew that Judas would later betray Him, He did not push Judas out of the circle. Jesus saw and acknowledged Judas. Jesus remembered him.
Because remembering means facing the full truth of our story — not editing out the parts that make us uncomfortable.
At the Communion table, we are invited to the same act of sacred remembering. We hold the bread and the cup, and we hold our stories — the parts we’re proud of, and the parts we’d rather forget. Christ gathers them all, redeems them all, and says, “Do this in remembrance of Me.”
It’s not nostalgia for a simpler faith. It’s a radical act of honesty. It’s how we stay awake to love in a world that keeps falling asleep to pain.
When Nations Fall Asleep
Since the time of Luke, whole societies have fallen captive to nostalgia — longing for imagined golden ages while ignoring the suffering those eras required. In every generation, nostalgia has been used to justify inequality, to excuse authoritarianism, and to disguise fear as patriotism.
When leaders promise to “restore” greatness without reckoning with the sins that corrupted it, they invite people to worship an illusion. Nostalgia thrives where memory has been silenced.
Faith, however, demands remembering. Real remembering. The kind that humbles nations and heals people. The kind that teaches us not to repeat Egypt, even when the wilderness feels hard.
Memory keeps us awake!
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Pastor Tommy
Our companion book for this series is Marilynne Robinson. Gilead. NY: Picador, 2004.
Tinatin Japaridze. “Erase & Rewind: The Politics of Nostalgia & its Ethical Implications.” © Carnegie Council for Ethics, April 23, 2025. Retrieved from: link