PASTOR DAVE’S MUSINGS FROM THE HEARTLAND

May 22, 2024

BEING ABLE TO RECALL WHAT IS IMPORTANT

Earlier this year while visiting my cousin Vicky who lives near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she gave me a Sayre family picture which had been matted and framed.  Very likely it dates to the late 19^th

century.

Vicky was sure that three of the persons in the picture were our grandmother Hogsett and her parents.  She was pretty sure a fourth person was my grandmother’s sister, Ethel.  For the five remaining persons, two women and three men, she could only hazard a guess.  However, she was fairly confident that they were all Sayres.

My only hope of being able to identify the unknown five persons is to show the picture to my Uncle Ralph and see if he has any suggestions.  He may have seen the picture before or individual pictures of the unidentified persons.

It would be wonderful if there were a data base that I could go to on the web that would show pictures of my Sayre relatives from the late 19^th century.   I would then be able to check  my pictures against those on the data base.

While such an exhaustive data base is not available today, future generations may well have one to access.  In the March 2007 Scientific America two Microsoft researchers, Gordon Bell  and Jim Gemmell, wrote an article entitled “A Digital Life.” In 2009 they expanded it into a book, Total Recall: How the e-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.  In the magazine article they put forth a proposal of how one might go about digitizing one’s everyday activities.  They were pleasantly surprised to discover that storage would not be a problem and that the immensity of the data base actually made it easier to retrieve specific bits of information.

While in the future it may well be possible to know even the minutest details concerning a person’s life, for my relatives in the picture all I really want to know is who they are, how am I related to them, and a little bit about their story.  I have no desire to know what they may have had for breakfast on May 22, 1897.

Sunday, May 15, on the public radio program “Are We Alone” Adam Gazzaley, director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of California at San Francisco, discussed with the program’s hosts the problem the human brain has focusing on what is important rather than distractions and interruptions.  While the latter two may sometimes be important, for the most part they just interfere with the brain concentrating on what is of real value.  Gazzaley believes that the modern trend to multitask has only compounded the problem.

Distilling what was important from distractions and attractive rabbit trails must have been an important task for the authors of the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible.  God must have worked overtime to keep them on the right track.  Instead of just a few books, volumes could have been recorded about the history of the chosen people.

The first few verses of the 12th chapter of Genesis offer a touchstone against which the authors of the Hebrew Bible made their decision about what to include.  They tell of the calling of Abraham when God blessed him to be a blessing to all nations and all people.  Here is to be found a key to understanding the story of the Hebrew people.

It would be great if I were able to recall the data which is important to tell my family’s story so I could pass it on to future generations just as the Jewish people have been doing for generations.

(This article was originally published May 22, 2011.  Comments may be sent to davidh15503@embarqmail.com.)