Lift Up Your Eyes: The Art of Remembering Help

Psalm 121; Isaiah 51:1–3; 2 Timothy 1:3–7

I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come? The psalmist’s question is not rhetorical. In the ancient Near East, hills and high places were where the pagan shrines stood. The question has an edge to it: will I look to the idols on the hills, or will I look to the Lord who made heaven and earth? It is a choice. A deliberate turning of the gaze.

Isaiah echoes this turning: Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you. Memory is a spiritual practice here. When we cannot see forward, we are invited to look back—not in nostalgia, but in trust. God has done this before. God will do this again.

"Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us." —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Paul writes to Timothy with the same backward-looking faith: I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. Faith is not invented fresh in each generation. It is inherited, passed down, breathed from one life into the next like fire passed from candle to candle.

There is a deep comfort in this. We do not begin from scratch. The cloud of witnesses—our grandmothers and grandfathers in faith, the saints and the unnamed faithful—have already walked the road we walk. Their prayers still linger. Their trust still holds.

Paul then offers one of the most tender exhortations in all his letters: God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline. The Greek word for cowardice is deilia—timidity, shrinking back. Paul is not shaming Timothy. He is reminding him. You already have what you need. It was given to you—through the laying on of hands, through the faith of your mothers, through the Spirit of the living God.

Evagrius Ponticus taught his monks that the demon of acedia—spiritual listlessness, the noonday devil—attacks by making us forget. We forget that God has sustained us. We forget the prayers of those who came before us. We forget our own moments of grace. The antidote to acedia is anamnesis—remembering. Not as intellectual exercise but as an act of the heart.

Today, lift up your eyes. But also: look back. Remember the rock from which you were hewn. Remember the grandmother’s faith, the quiet prayers spoken over you when you were too young to understand. Remember that the One who keeps you does not slumber or sleep. Your help comes—not from the hills, not from the idols—but from the Lord who has been keeping you all along.

The spirit of power and love and self-discipline that Paul describes is not something we manufacture through religious effort. It is a gift—already given, already present, waiting to be remembered and activated. The desert tradition called this the indwelling Spirit, the flame that burns steadily in the inner chamber of the heart. Our task is not to light the flame but to remove whatever blocks its warmth from reaching us. The discipline Paul commends is not the discipline of striving but the discipline of clearing away—removing the debris of distraction so the gift already given can do its work.