Creating Memorials

There is a photograph Jeff Hawthorne carries on his phone. It was taken on a summer afternoon in the mountains above Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of his life. He and his three kids had climbed up past the treeline and sat down on a ledge in the rocks, and for thirty minutes nobody said a word. The silence wasn't awkward. It was sacred. It was the kind of quiet that only comes when grief has exhausted itself and something else — something stubborn and alive — begins to take its place. Jeff looks at that photograph often. Not to rehearse the pain, but to remember what God was doing in the middle of it.

That photograph is, for Jeff, a memorial.

Memorials, as it turns out, are one of God's most persistent and practical gifts to His people. From the moment He gave Moses His name in the wilderness to the night Jesus broke bread in an upper room and said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” the arc of Scripture is lined with stones and symbols and stories, all placed there for one reason: because we forget. We forget what God has done. We forget who He is. And when we forget, we lose our footing. We lose our courage. We begin to wonder whether any of it was ever real.

This chapter is about the practice of remembering — not as sentiment, not as nostalgia, but as a spiritual discipline that shapes the way we live, the stories we tell, and the faith we pass on to the people who come after us.

A Man Who Learned to Remember

Jeff Hawthorne is not a man who talks easily about his failures. He grew up in a family where stories stayed locked inside, where questions about the past were met with silence or tears. His father served in the Navy for nearly a decade but spoke almost nothing of it. His grandfather’s history was a closed door. His birth father’s identity — a consequence of an affair his mother carried with great shame — was never discussed. He has never seen a photograph of the man.

“My family is not a storytelling family,” Jeff said plainly. “And I think sometimes we can get caught in our own shame and guilt cycle, and it causes us to clam up. The stories are meant to be shared. They’re meant to be told.”

Jeff walked into his first marriage declaring that divorce was not an option. Nearly ten years later, it was. And for years after, every weekend carried a kind of memorial he hadn’t chosen: the moment he dropped his kids off and wouldn’t see them again for days. Those recurring goodbyes became a rhythm of grief, a stone he stumbled over again and again.

But the story didn’t end there. It never does, when God is still writing it.

There is a photograph from Jeff’s first date with his wife that hangs in their entryway — the first thing he sees when he walks through the door. There’s a Christmas photo from before they were married, taken when he already knew she was the one. There is a gratitude journal with a handwritten date at the top of each entry and three things he is grateful for, every single morning. Sometimes it’s tacos. Sometimes it’s the smell of coffee. Sometimes it’s the face of a man across a breakfast table who said something that landed in his chest like a gift. Jeff writes it all down.

He chose to write it by hand for a specific reason. “Years from now,” he said, “when I’m gone, my kids could have something that spoke to how grateful their dad was.” The journal is itself a memorial — a stone set up to say: thus far, the Lord has helped us.

“Every time I tell my story, the response I’m met with is: ‘Wow. Thanks for sharing that. That’s encouraging. That brings me hope.’ And I don’t tell it nearly enough.”

— Jeff Hawthorne

Why Memorials Matter: A People Who Forget

Psalm 77 begins in a place most of us know well: in distress, crying out to God, unable to sleep, too troubled to speak. The psalmist rehearses his anxiety in a spiral of unanswerable questions. “Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time?”

And then comes one of the great pivots in the whole of Scripture. A single word turns the tide: “Then.”

“Then I thought to this: I will appeal to the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand. I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”

This is the work of remembering. Not wishful thinking. Not positive self-talk. It is a deliberate, disciplined return to the record of God’s faithfulness — a going back to the stones that have been set up, the names that have been spoken, the stories that have been told. The psalmist doesn’t conjure hope from thin air. He retrieves it from memory. He walks back to the place where he laid something down, picks it up, and carries it forward.

The great challenge, of course, is that we are a forgetful people. We have always been. The Lord knows this about us with a tenderness that borders on exasperation. The entire structure of Old Testament life — the festivals, the feasts, the laws, the altars, the priests, the sacrificial system — can be read, in part, as God’s long, patient, creative effort to build remembrance into the bones of a people who would otherwise forget Him by Thursday.

Andy put it plainly during one of our conversations: “Paul’s letter to America — what did you do to all of this?” The Jews had a prayer when they woke, a prayer at meals, a prayer at the doorpost. They had feasts woven through the year, each one pointing to a specific act of God’s faithfulness. We have largely dismantled all of that structure, and we wonder why we can’t seem to hold on to what we believe.

The answer, at least in part, is that we have stopped building memorials.

1. Names and Symbols

Exodus 3:13–15 — The Memorial of God’s Name

Exodus 3:13–15

Moses said to God, ‘Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I am has sent me to you.” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob — has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.”

Moses stood at the edge of something terrifying. He had been called to walk back into the country that had wanted him dead, to stand before the most powerful man in the world, and to declare freedom for an enslaved people. He needed something to give the Israelites. Not a strategy. Not a plan. A name.

And God gave him one.

It is easy to skip past the genealogies and the name-lists of Scripture, to treat them as ancient filler between the stories we’re more interested in. But names in the Hebrew tradition carried everything: lineage, authority, identity, covenant. To know someone’s name was to know their story. To speak it was to invoke it. When God said, “This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation,” He was setting up a memorial — one that every Israelite would carry on their lips and in their hearts wherever they went.

“I think we all understand the power of a name,” Jeff reflected. “What is communicated in a name is lineage, a family you’re a part of, an authority that comes with that, a confidence.” Moses didn’t walk back to Egypt armed only with a staff. He walked back with the name of the Living God — and that name was itself a memorial to everything God had already done, and a promise of everything He was about to do.

Genesis 9:12–15 — The Memorial of the Rainbow

Genesis 9:12–15

Then God said: “I am giving you a sign of my covenant with you and with all living creatures, for all generations to come. I have placed my rainbow in the clouds. It is the sign of my covenant with you and with all the earth. When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will appear in the clouds, and I will remember my covenant with you and with all living creatures. Never again will the floodwaters destroy all life.”

Here is something remarkable: this memorial was not primarily for Noah and his family. It was for God.

This is worth sitting with. God — the one who does not forget, who does not change, who does not waver — set up a sign in the sky as a reminder to Himself. The men in the room paused on this for a long moment. Tim laughed and said, “I start to think, ‘Ooh, I wonder who He’s mad at right now.’” But beneath the laughter was something genuinely moving: a God who knows how to meet His people where they are, who builds into the very fabric of creation the structures of covenant faithfulness.

There was also a question about the physics of it — whether the rainbow was something already present in nature that God claimed and redeemed for holy purpose, or whether He changed the laws of refraction on the spot. One of the men offered that before the flood, a kind of greenhouse canopy may have existed, so that rainbows would have been unknown. With the world reshaped, the rainbow appeared for the first time as the clouds parted. Whether or not that is so, the theological weight is the same: something visible, something beautiful, placed in the creation as a marker of promise.

And consider what it was a promise toward. Noah and his family had just survived forty days and forty nights of catastrophic flood. They had watched the world they knew end. They stepped off the ark onto unfamiliar ground, and God did not simply say, “Okay, go rebuild.” He gave them a sign. He gave them a reason to live forward. The rainbow was not just a memorial to the past — it was an invitation to the future. Go and be fruitful. Go and multiply. The worst is behind you. I am with you.

“Memorials are not primarily human inventions to help us feel nostalgic. They are God’s gifts to help us remember His character and His covenant, and to live in light of them.”

— Jeff Hawthorne

This is the key insight that reframes how we understand memorials: they are not monuments to the past. They are launching pads into the future. Every stone, every symbol, every name and ritual and practice is meant to say: because of what God has already done, you can trust what He is about to do.

2. Stones and Stories

Joshua 4:1–7, 21–24 — The Memorial of Twelve Stones

Joshua 4:5–7

“Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

The Israelites had just crossed the Jordan River on dry ground. Behind them was a generation of wandering. Ahead of them was a land promised but not yet possessed. And God, before they took another step, stopped the whole procession and said: go back. Take twelve stones from the middle of the riverbed. Stack them here.

Why?

Jeff landed on a phrase that stayed with everyone in the room: “preplanned opportunities for testimony.” The stones weren’t for the adults who’d watched the water stop. They were for the children who would one day point at that pile of rocks and say, “What are these?” And in that moment, a parent would have the opportunity — not an accident, not a lucky opening, but a designed and preplanned opportunity — to tell the story. To say: let me tell you what God did here.

Jeff turned the question around on the men: “What are the preplanned opportunities for testimony in your own life? What are the memorials that make people ask ‘why’ — and then require you to follow up with a story of faithfulness?”

The room got quiet. It is easier to ask the question than to answer it.

There is a telling implication in Scripture that the people of God would want to tell these stories. The assumption is not that testimony needs to be extracted under pressure, but that the faithful life produces stories that overflow, stories that demand to be shared because God has been too good, too faithful, too present for silence. And yet, as Jeff noted with real honesty, something in us resists. For men in particular, the stories stay locked inside. Shame keeps them there. Guilt keeps them there. The suspicion that no one really wants to hear it, that the story belongs only to us, that to share it might be to expose too much.

But the stones were never meant to stay in the riverbed. They were meant to be stacked in public, where children would see them and ask questions.

Three Things the Memorial Does

Looking at the Joshua passage, Jeff drew out three characteristics of a true memorial:

The memorial is tangible. You can touch it, see it, point to it. It exists in the physical world, not just in memory.
The memorial is connected to a story. Stones by themselves mean nothing. As Jeff put it, “Stones plus story shape faith.” A stack of rocks on a trail is just a curiosity. A stack of rocks with a story behind it becomes a marker on the map of a life.
The memorial is intergenerational. It is specifically designed for the questions of children and the answers of parents. The memorial is not complete until it is passed on.

The hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” understands all of this. Its second verse reaches back to 1 Samuel 7:12 for its central image:

1 Samuel 7:12

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.”

Ebenezer: stone of help. “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” Samuel planted a stone in the ground and gave it a name that told a story and made a claim about the future: if God has been faithful thus far, we can trust Him for what lies ahead. The stone became a standing argument against despair.

The hymn’s third verse gives the memorial its full emotional weight: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it — prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.” This is not triumphalism. It is honest faith: I know myself. I know how quickly I forget. I know that without these stones, without these markers, without these practices of remembrance, my heart will drift. So I set up the stone. And I come back to it.

“I see my kids as a memorial to my testimony. Your lives are so different from what I grew up with, what my dad grew up with. I just have to look at them and say, ‘But for God.’”

— Ron

One of the men in the room named Ron offered something that stopped the conversation cold. Looking at his children, he said quietly: “They are your Ebenezer stone.” And something in the room recognized the truth of it. The people who bear the fingerprints of God’s faithfulness in our lives — the children we didn’t deserve, the marriages we couldn’t have manufactured, the friendships that arrived at exactly the right moment — these are memorials. They are stones God has set in the ground of our lives to mark how far He has brought us.

The conversation also turned toward what memorials mark as endings — not just beginnings. Thomas pressed into this: “I think memorials are also about helping you mark the end of something. And grieving.” There is something in us that needs a ceremony for the things that die, whether that’s a relationship, a season, a version of ourselves we’ve outgrown. Without a marker, the ending stays loose. It bleeds into the next thing. The grief has nowhere to land.

Jeff recognized this from his own story. His divorce — something he would not wish on anyone, something he stayed in too long out of stubbornness and pride — had its own memorial moment. The day it was finally done was the day something ended, and he knew it. Not with relief exactly, but with the strange, solemn recognition that an era had closed. And with it came, eventually, the possibility of something new.

3. Memorials Have a Rhythm and a Cadence

The Jewish calendar was a masterwork of embodied theology. The Sabbath every seven days. Passover every year. The Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Day of Atonement — each one a scheduled return to a particular act of God’s faithfulness, a built-in moment for the community to stop, remember, and re-orient.

Andy observed that so much of what fills the Old Testament can be understood as God responding to His people’s persistent need for structure. They needed a king. He gave them a king. They needed six hundred-plus laws to try to stay on the path of holiness. He gave them that too. The tent of meeting, the ark of the covenant, the entire sacrificial system — all of it, at least in part, God saying: I know you need a spot. I know you need something you can see and touch and return to. Here it is.

There is something important here for those of us living two or three millennia later on the other side of the Jordan. The structures are different, but the need is the same. We are still forgetful. We still need rhythms that bring us back to the story.

Jeff put the question directly: “What are the landscapes and rhythms of your life that help you remember and prompt you to tell the stories?”

For some of us, the honest answer is: not many. We have the standard Christian calendar — Easter, Christmas, maybe the Lord’s Supper once a month or once a quarter. But what about the rhythms that are shaped by our own particular story with God? What are the regular practices, the returning rituals, the habitual movements of our lives that bring us back to the record of His faithfulness?

Tim spoke of the altar — something he has missed in modern church. “I’m always a little nervous when we destroy memorials or tear things down,” he said. “There’s stuff I don’t want to read or think about, but I think it’s important to not forget it.” He remembered kneeling at seventeen in a Nazarene church, the pastor coming down to pray with him, the words: “Drive the stake right here.” Thirty years later, the memory is still a stake in the ground, a point he can return to.

The memorials that endure are the ones tethered to a rhythm. The gratitude journal opened every morning. The anniversary remembered. The photograph revisited. The conversation returned to. They do not require elaborate ceremony — only intention and consistency. The point is not the form but the function: to bring the wandering heart back to the God who has been faithful.

“Drive the stake right here. There’s nothing that can take that away. That’s got a placeholder in my life and in my spirit of this is where this happened.”

— Tim

4. Jesus as a Memorial

Luke 22:14–20 — The Memorial of the Lord’s Table

Luke 22:19–20

And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”

At the center of the Christian faith stands a memorial.

Jesus did not leave his followers with an abstraction. He left them with bread and wine — physical, tangible things — and He said: every time you do this, remember me. This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.

Jeff has come to love that his church practices the Lord’s Supper every single week. It was not always so. As a worship leader in earlier years, he found it an intrusion — time that could be given to another song, another moment of corporate worship. But something has shifted. “In my more spiritually mature state,” he said with a self-aware smile, “I love that I get this every single weekend. This reminder, this memorial that was set up for me, to point back to where it all both begins and ends.”

Every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we are doing three things simultaneously:

Looking back to the cross — to the specific, historical act of God in the body of Jesus Christ, the death that paid what could not otherwise be paid.

Looking around at the body of Christ gathered — at the community of people who carry the same story, who are themselves memorials of God’s faithfulness to one another.

Looking forward to the day when He returns — toward the future that the Lord’s Supper promises, the great feast at the end of all things when the memorial becomes the reality.

Past grace fuels present faith and future hope. This is the rhythm of the Table. This is what it does to us when we let it.

And this — people as memorials — becomes the final and perhaps most personal dimension of the practice. Jeff spoke of his wife, whose very existence in his life he reads as a sign of God’s faithfulness. After a divorce that left him certain he would never be able to love or be loved in marriage again, God gave him a crown, to use the language of Proverbs. The first thing he sees when he walks through his front door is the photograph from their first date. It is a memorial.

His children, even in the hardest days of the divorce — especially then — were memorials. They brought laughter when he could not stop crying. They brought joy when joy had no business showing up. They were three small, living stones set in the ground of his hardest season, each one saying: thus far, the Lord has helped us.

“My wife is a sign of His faithfulness. I thought it would never be possible again to love and be married and all that. But there she is.”

— Jeff Hawthorne

Memorials for Today: Practices for a Forgetful People

The principle has not changed. God wants His people to remember who He is and what He has done, so they can live faithfully in the present and pass that faith on to the next generation. The question is simply what that looks like now, in our own lives, in our own families, in our own ordinary and extraordinary stories.

There is wisdom in the conversation about what gets thrown away. One of the men described the strange grief of discarding his aunt’s religious certificates after she died — walking to the dumpster with the symbols of a life given to God and dropping them in. Another described emptying his mother’s house and filling three roll-off containers with the accumulated artifacts of a life. We keep things because we think they matter; eventually, they get carried to the curb.

This is worth taking seriously. Not everything we keep is a memorial, and not everything we discard was meant to last. The question is: which things truly point to God’s faithfulness in our lives? Which things carry a story? Which things, if a child asked about them, would give us the opportunity to say: let me tell you what God did?

Jeff also described an inverse memorial: the military awards and academy honors he packed away in a trunk in the basement when he transitioned out of the corporate world into something new. He packed them away not out of shame but out of discernment — recognizing that his identity could not be anchored in past performance. The season had changed. The memorial had done its work. It was time for something else.

But then he paused. “My kids don’t have anything to prompt them to ask me about such and such.” The memorial that helped him move forward also removed from his children’s sight the stories they might one day need to hear. There is a tension here that doesn’t resolve easily: between the memorials we need to set down and the stories we still owe to those who come after us.

Mathias pointed to the museums of Washington D.C. — billions of dollars spent annually so that people can stand in front of the things that made them. The Star-Spangled Banner in its darkened room. The memorials to wars and fallen soldiers. The artifacts of moments that changed everything. People travel hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars to see these things, not because the things happened to them, but because the stories are timeless and the need to be tethered to something real and significant is written into human nature.

God knew this about us before we did. So He gave us His name. He gave us the rainbow. He gave us twelve stones. He gave us bread and wine. He gave us people who carry His faithfulness in their lives. And He gave us the practice of returning, regularly and intentionally, to all of these things.

Questions to Reflect On

Jeff closed his time with a set of questions worth carrying into the week — and perhaps into the rest of a life:

What is one “stone of remembrance” in your life — a moment, a place, a person, a practice — that marks what God has done?
What story of God’s faithfulness do you need to tell more often? What has kept you from telling it?
What practice could help your family, small group, or church remember God better? What would it look like to build that rhythm into your life this week?
Are there memorials that have ended — eras, relationships, seasons — that need to be named and mourned before you can fully move forward?
What would it look like for your own life to become a memorial for someone else — a living stone that points others toward God’s faithfulness?

A Challenge and a Commission

Jeff ended with a simple challenge, offered in the same tone he carries throughout — not thundering, but earnest, the way a man speaks when he has lived the thing he is asking you to consider:

“If you don’t have a memorial — an intentional memorial — that keeps you in it right now, you need one. And if you do, what does it mean to take that to the next level and tell the stories?”

The beaten-up Bible Tom carries. The journal Russell keeps. The photographs Jeff scrolls through on his phone on ordinary evenings. The children who carry in their lives the evidence of something God has been doing across generations. These are not relics. They are living things. They do not preserve the past — they fund the future.

Memorials keep stories of God’s faithfulness in front of us when we tend to forget.

And we will forget. That is not a failure; it is a feature of the human condition that God has been addressing with infinite patience since the beginning. The answer is not to try harder to remember. The answer is to build the structures, practice the rhythms, tell the stories, stack the stones — and then return to them, again and again, as often as it takes, until the faithful life becomes second nature.

Thus far, the Lord has helped us.

That has always been enough.

• • •

A Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father,

You know us. You know that we forget. You know how quickly the fire of a moment cools, how fast the clarity of a mountain summit fades when we return to the valley. You knew all of this before you set a rainbow in the sky, before you told Moses your name, before twelve men carried twelve stones out of a dry riverbed.

Thank you that you have not left us without help. Thank you for the symbols and signs, the practices and rhythms, the people and places that keep your faithfulness in front of us when we are prone to wander. Thank you for the bread and the cup. Thank you for the stories we carry and the ones we have yet to tell.

Give us courage to tell the stories we have kept too long in silence. Give us wisdom to build the rhythms that will carry those stories to our children and our children’s children. Give us eyes to see the memorials you have already placed in our lives — the people, the moments, the hard-won gifts of your grace — and hearts willing to call them what they are.

And when we forget — because we will — bring us back to the stones. Bring us back to the cross. Bring us back to the record of what you have done, and let that record be enough to carry us into what comes next.

Thus far, you have helped us.

That is enough.

In the name of Jesus, the greatest memorial of all. Amen.