I tried to write this last night, but couldn’t. I needed to let my brain cool off after a long weekend of all the kids home—so many conversations, questions, planning, activities. My brain needed time to identify, file, organize, and process everything I experienced over the past four days.

Something that helps me process and remember these sweet times is to record it in any number of ways. I love to take pictures.

Way back when my kids were in grade school and high school scrapbooking was the rage. But not for me. All that card stock, stickers, loose pages, and the thing that cut shapes—I was overwhelmed. I only wanted to return to the days of sliding a picture into a clear plastic slot in a photo album. Today I use the old-fashioned clear-sleeved picture albums. Love!

I also love to write about my day. I don’t write a lot, but a little of what happened, what I enjoyed, learned, would change, and am thankful for. I have notebooks of all sizes filled with my life and my family’s lives.

My grandma used to keep a simple journal. She recorded the day’s high and low temperature and a little about what she did that day. How precious would even one of those notebooks be to me today.

Often we go to fast through life, not leaving spaces in between to process what we experience. We speed into the next thing—work, school, meetings, church—without feeling the emotions and processing.

By recording pieces of our lives, we relive and process the event. The memory and emotional roots of the day go deeper into our memories. Then years later when we read or see what we recorded years earlier, we are immediately transported back to that moment and given the gift to experience it again.

Think about what medium you would enjoy—photos, writing, scrapbooking, video, etc. Then use it every so often to remember your life, not every day, maybe not even every week, but not on special events only.

Throughout the Old Testament God told the Israelites to record and commemorate the amazing things God did for them. Recording our lives does the same; it gives us a foundation to build our faith in our faithful God.

Also the purpose of recording our lives is to give future you and future family, remembrances of not only what happened but the emotions, the heart-to-heart experiences, the growing times, the aha times, the funny times, the warmth of a life well-lived.

Go ahead. Pick up a pen and paper and write what you did today, what made you smile, what you wished you did differently, what you were thankful for. Immediately it becomes a piece of treasured family history for years and years to come.

Brenda Garrison is an author and speaker who empowers women with the confidence to live their calling. Brenda is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Science Degree in Ministry Leadership with a Concentration in Women’s Ministry at Moody Bible Institute. She and her husband, Gene, are the parents of three young adult daughters and live near Metamora, IL.