As humans, we’re naturally prone to forget the positive things that happen to us. Psychologist Rick Hanson is fond of saying, “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.”

This explains why it’s much easier to recall the bully who teased you in the third grade than the kind neighbor who watched you after school and fed you warm cookies. I have more vivid memories of when my 11th-grade homecoming date stood me up than afterward when my dad ordered pizza and let me cry it out. 

Our brain’s “velcro tendency” is also known as negative bias. This concept explains our brain’s natural wiring to hold onto what’s painful or hurtful to protect us from repeating that hurt in the future. For example, as kids, we learned that fire was hot because we sometimes burned ourselves. Our brains store that information to ensure we don’t burn ourselves again. This function has a helpful purpose: keeping us from physical danger. Yet, negative bias doesn’t help nurture emotional or spiritual health.

Suppose you’re not aware and intentional about managing negative bias. In that case, your brain will collect dozens, even hundreds, of mental photo albums filled with bad memories or mental computer hard drives of unhappy moments that make you believe that life is only hard, horrible, or full of heartache. 

Unless you enjoy reliving awful moments while sipping lemonade on a hot day, you’ll want to tap into God’s remedy for negative bias. He gave us a helpful tool to hold onto meaningful and miraculous memories and velcro them to our brains so they won’t slip away.   

In Joshua 4, God instructed the Israelites to mark a special moment as they prepared to cross the Jordan River. 

God instructed their leader, Joshua, to direct one man from each of the twelve tribes of Israel to pull a stone from the center of the Jordan while God held back the waters. With these stones, they constructed a memorial on the edge of the river by their campsite. Then, they assembled another monument of stones in the center of the Jordan. Here’s what Joshua told the people when their children asked them why the stone memorial was there:

“For the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes, and he kept it dry until you were all across, just as he did at the Red Sea when he dried it up until we had all crossed over. He did this so all the nations of the earth might know that the Lord’s hand is powerful, and so you might fear the Lord your God forever.”
Joshua 4:23-24 NLT

In their 40 years of wandering the wilderness, the Israelites anticipated the excitement of entering a new home. They’d finally stop roaming around and settle down. Yet, God wanted to ensure they did not forget that He parted the Jordan River to make entering their new home possible. Forty years earlier, God parted the Red Sea for the Israelites to escape Egypt and fed them food from heaven each day they wandered. For all of the blessings and miracles that God had done, He knew that the Israelites were prone to forgetfulness. 

We forget, too. 

It’s so easy to focus on what is missing, broken, or changed in our lives that we forget God’s blessings or minimize them in our minds.  

For a decade, our family faced an alcohol addiction crisis in our home. Daily, sadness, instability, and uncertainty hovered over our household. On any given day, I steeled myself for another new crisis and weathered a loved one’s irrational words or erratic behavior. While there were periodic moments to celebrate, my mental photo albums of sadness overflowed; the collection of hard memories seemed easier to recall than the good ones. Even when God moved miraculously in a crisis, my brain quickly tossed those memories to the back of my mind.

I read the story in Joshua 4 during the final separation in my marriage and decided to create my stone memorial. I drove to the craft store and purchased a glass container and twelve large decorative stones with flat bottoms that I could write on. On the bottom of each stone, I wrote a few words describing God’s miraculous work or faithfulness in my life. As I recalled those moments, I could sense my mind reshuffling that photo album of blessings to the front of my memory, and my heart was lifted. 

After writing on all twelve stones, I placed the memorial on a table where I could see the reminders regularly. Every time I saw those stones it prompted me to believe that the same God who had been at work would continue working in my life, even on the hard days. 

If your mental photo albums only show bad or sad moments, perhaps you can create a list of twelve God moments and post that list in a place where you’ll see it.

If you’ve seen where God’s goodness and grace have carried you through in the past, that same goodness and grace will meet you again.

For more encouragement on getting through anxious times, check out Barb’s Bible Study, Joshua: Winning the Worry Battle.

Listen to today’s devotion on the player below or on your favorite podcast app!

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