Jesus Loves Me This I Know

Throughout our lives we create so many memories – memories from childhood, from school, falling in love, raising our kids and so on. If we are blessed to live long enough, we will have many, many memories. Some people lose these memories, for varied reasons.

For some it happens suddenly and is from physical or emotional trauma. Others, it may take years to lose every memory, but they go, one by one, a name, a big life event, the memory of one’s child or spouse, and then the memory of how to do basic things, like bathing, dressing and eventually even breathing.

It is a terribly depressing thought, but this happens, to some of the elderly through Dementia and Alzheimer’s.

My Great Uncle Bill slowly lost all his memories to this dreadful disease. By the time he was in his 80’s he was resigned to a nursing home bed- no memory, just laying, mumbling in a diaper.

My memories of Uncle Bill were of a strong and very kind man. He and my Great Aunt never were able to have children of their own, but they treated me and my siblings as if we were theirs whenever we visited them.

His last name was King, which was what most people including his wife called him. It was a fitting nick name for a great man. I had only seen Uncle Bill a very few times since we moved away when I was nine years old. I went to visit him in the nursing home many years later after I was married and had my own children.

My mother had informed me that he only remembered this one thing, a song…”Jesus Loves Me”. At some point in Uncle Bill’s childhood, someone took the time to sing to him, to teach him this song and about the Love of a Man he had never met. Nothing can compare you to see someone so strong, become so weak, and dependent on others for care.

As I timidly entered his room and made my way to his bedside, Uncle Bill looked at me with a haze over his eyes that once sparkled blue as the ocean. I knew immediately he did not remember me, or anything else, he just mumbled. I told him who I was and that I had heard that he knew a song.

As I began to sing it, immediately he chimed right in “Jesus loves me this I know for the bible tells me so”. 

Uncle Bill sang loud and clear as a bell, every word, smiling a toothless grin all the time.

He sang with me as tears streamed down my face and my heart pounding, God revealed to me, to remember this one thing…Jesus Loves Me This I Know.

At the end of his life and ours, nothing else matters, other than the memory and saving knowledge of the Love of Jesus Christ.

We all get tired, tired of mothering, of working, playing, singing Sunday school songs and just plain “weary in well doing’.

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galations 6:9 (NIV)

Just remember this one thing, at some point 80 years before that moment in the nursing home, a tired and weary mother, or Sunday school teacher took the time to teach a child that “Jesus loves me this I know.

Remember this one thing……

“Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he shall not depart from it” Proverbs 22:6(KJV)

 I am a wife to a wonderful husband of 19 years, mother to a 16 year old son an 18 year old daughter and 2 small rescue dogs. I have a passion for Christ and for others to know Him.  I love sharinng my heart. I want to leave a legacy of love and mercy. When you hurt, I hurt, when you cry, I cry, when you laugh until you pee…..well you get the picture! We are all in this thing together.