Faith & Formation
Raise Your Ebenezer
Most of us have forgotten something we swore we would never forget.
Not a name or an appointment. A rescue. A time when you were in real trouble and something happened that you could not explain, and you said out loud, I will never forget this — and then eighteen months later you were in trouble again and it did not once occur to you that you had been here before.
I have done this. Most of us have. Human memory is astonishingly good at retaining the lyrics to songs from 1994 and astonishingly bad at retaining the times God showed up. I do not think that is an accident. Forgetting is the default. Remembering is a discipline.
the most carefully modest sentence in the Bible
After the thunder, after the pursuit, after the Philistines had been chased past Beth-car, Samuel did something that must have looked to anyone watching like an anticlimax. He found a stone and stood it on end.
He named it Ebenezer — stone of help — and the explanation he attached to it was this:
The Lord has helped us to this point.
To this point. Not to the end. Not forever. Not the Philistines will never trouble us again. To this point. A marker that said: here is how far we have come, and it was Him, and we are not done.
It was a stone about the past, placed for the future — so that the next time the Philistines came, and Samuel was old enough to know they would, Israel would walk past it on the way to the battle.
the detail that undoes me
First Samuel 4 opens with Israel camping at a place the writer calls Ebenezer, being routed there, and losing the ark. That camp was near Aphek, a long way from Mizpah, and the stone was not raised for another twenty years.
The writer knew that. He reached forward anyway and called the field of the defeat by the name of the stone that had not yet been set — so that anyone reading the whole book would hear the echo. The name of the worst day is the name of the help.
The marker did not erase the defeat. It renamed it: and then He helped.
why this is not positive thinking
There is a clinical reason remembering is hard, and it is not moral weakness.
Negative events are encoded faster, held longer, and recalled more readily than positive ones. This is not a character flaw; it is a survival feature, and it worked. The ancestor who remembered which valley held the predator outlived the one who remembered which valley held the good light.
Which means an accurate memory of your own life requires deliberate correction. Left alone, your recall will over-represent the ambushes and under-represent the help, and you will experience that skewed record as simply what happened.
So a log is not sentimentality. It is not a gratitude journal, and it is not an instruction to be positive about hard things. It is a correction applied to a known measurement error — the same reason you write down expenses instead of estimating them from memory at the end of the month.
one thing you can do this week
Start the log with one entry, and make it a past one.
Not today. Go back and find a time you were in real trouble and came out the other side, and write three lines: what the pressure was, what it revealed, and what turned out to be already true that you could not see at the time.
Then leave it somewhere you will walk past. The stone was not in a museum. It was on the road to the next battle, which is the only place a marker is any use.
And when the next hard week arrives — not if — you will have something to argue with. Not a feeling. A record.
Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC, has spent her career across from people being seen at the worst possible moment. Exposed but Not Abandoned: What Pressure Reveals and What Grace Makes Possible closes with the Ebenezer Log, and the companion workbook keeps it for you, entry by entry, on your own device.