My friend Raymond McHenry tells of Paul McCartney’s inspiration for his latest album, “Memory Almost Full.” The former Beatle said he saw that phrase on his cell phone and found it a metaphor for our lives today. He said, “I think we all need to delete stuff every so often.”

In the last few years of my father’s life, his mind began to turn on him and become his enemy. Old hurts and slights which he had either dealt with or had buried decades earlier began to reappear and reassert themselves into his consciousness. On several occasions as we sat and chatted, he brought up the time when he was 18 years old, the eldest of what would become 12 children, and his mother ordered him out of the house. He and the brother just younger than him, Marion, whom everyone called ‘Gip,’ were constantly fighting and Grandma told Carl to get his things and get out.

“That wasn’t right,” he would say. “I was doing right, and all Gip wanted to do was have fun and get out of work any way he could, and yet she threw me out of the house.”

Not being there, all I knew of that incident was what he related, and I had no inclination to find out any more of the situation. Both Dad and Gip were now elderly, and Gip was a fine loving Christian man living in the mountains of Virginia, and we naturally felt that whatever conflicts they had known in their youth should be left there. On a logical level, Dad knew it too. But there was nothing logical about this bad memory that hounded him and robbed him of his peace.

I tried the logical approach. I pointed out that by age 18 he had been earning his keep for nearly 6 years, and that Grandma knew he could take care of himself. I reminded him that with a houseful of children, she must have been stressed out, and with her two oldest sons fighting, she just wanted some peace and took the quickest route to get it. “If anything,” I said, “she was showing her trust in you, that you were responsible enough to leave home and take care of yourself.”

Nothing worked.

I made a mental note to keep in mind as I move into the older years that the brain can pull this kind of cruel stunt and unearth old slights long buried and presumably forgotten, and to be on the lookout.

Eventually, as Dad’s condition deteriorated in the year before his death, the memory of that old hurt faded and he did not mention it again.

One technique I tried in order to gain some peace for him is worth remarking on here.

I’ve mentioned previously how Dad was a rough customer in the first half of his 95 years on earth, with a capacity for harshness in disciplining his children, a profane tongue in everyday speech, and a quick temper directed toward anyone doing him wrong. But God changed him, and the last half of his long life, he grew kinder and more thoughtful, more spiritual and generous.

Please bear that in mind.

Now, I need to tell a painful story. Since Dad read every word that was printed in this blog during his last years, and I would not have hurt him for the world, I have waited to write this until He gained the perspective of Heaven and such matters no longer concern him. I record it here for one reason only: to help someone else who is having trouble dealing with the pain of the past, hurts and aches they need to turn loose of and give up to the Heavenly Father, the God of all healing.

I must have been 9 years old and was having trouble with my hip, which eventually resulted in surgery at the miners’ hospital in Beckley, West Virginia, involving an 11-day stay. In preparation for surgery, Dad often accompanied me to the hospital, which required a one mile walk from our mining camp and a six-mile bus ride into town. This Saturday morning, we had seen the doctors and were now waiting on the corner for the bus, across the street from a drug store.

“You want anything?” Dad said. I said, “Sir?” not sure of what he meant. “The drug store. Would you like to go in and get something?”

I had heard of the soda fountains inside drug stores where people sat and ordered sandwiches and shakes, but had never seen one. It seemed like a wonderland. I said, “I’d like to get a hamburger and a milkshake.”

For reasons I will not understand in a thousand years, he let loose with an explosion of profanity all out of proportion to what was happening. I stood there stoically, not moving, not wanting to further enrage him, but without a clue as to what was happening. We remained on the corner, the bus soon came, and we went home. Nothing was ever said about this incident.

In 1999, I drove from Chicago to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and spent the night in Charleston, West Virginia. The next day, I drove around Beckley and relived some of my early memories, almost all of them good ones. Suddenly I wondered if I could find that old hospital that figured so prominently in my youth. Without a map and going strictly by memory, I took the correct turn and there it was, boarded up, with a sign indicating where the new hospital was now located. I got out of the car and looked up at the window of the 4th floor ward where I lay for over a week in a long cast without so much as being stood on my feet. The hospital care in 1948 was vastly more primitive than today.

Then I turned around and noticed across the street what used to be the drug store and was now some kind of hardware supply. It was right here on this street corner where we caught the bus out to Affinity. All the memories rushed back in. I was 59 years old and standing on a street corner, and I was crying like a baby. I wept for that little boy who had been so cruelly treated by a man I love (loved then, love now) with all my heart.

Not for a second and not for a million dollars would I have ever called that to my dad’s attention. He probably did not know then what it was about, and surely would not know now, I reasoned. It would only hurt him to find out how deeply he had wounded me. I would let it go.

Sometime later, a counselor pulled this story out of me, then offered to pray for me. As she lifted me to the Father, I felt the Master take this awful hurt from me and heal it.

As the saying goes, it heals but leaves a scar.

Now, sitting with my Dad in his bedroom no more than a couple of years ago and hearing him tell once more of the pain his mom, my wonderful Grandma Bessie, had caused him when he was 18, I tried something. I said, “Dad, every parent makes mistakes. I have asked my children if they are carrying old hurts and pains from what I did or said or did not do and should have. And in a case or two, they really did have a hurtful memory. So we talked about it and I asked them to forgive me.”

He seemed to be listening, so I said, “Dad, did you ever make a mistake in raising your children?” As number four of his six children, I knew the answer to that question, of course. I could have given him quite a list, but this was not about my memories–all of which the Lord had healed–but about his.

“None that I can think of,” he said. I almost came out of my chair. He cannot remember a single mistake in raising his children! No wonder he’s angry at Grandmother for hers.

Dad’s mind was treating him cruelly and unfairly, digging up the bones of ancient hurts and slights which were long buried and well-forgotten, but erasing all evidence of his own fallibility and humanity.

As a pastor, I have frequently performed the funerals of fathers and at some point in the service said to the family, “No father is perfect. They all make mistakes. I’m the father of three and the grandfather of eight, and I surely have made my share. May I be your pastor for a moment here and give you some good counsel? Forgive your father. Forgive him for what he did wrong. Forgive him for the times he was not there when you needed him.”

I remind them that some day when it’s their turn to be the honored guest at such a service, they will want their children to show them the same grace and not remember their failures.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

It helps me more than I can express that the Father does not hold us to an impossible standard of perfection. “He Himself knows our frame,” we are told in Scripture. “He remembers that we are but dust.” (Psalm 103)

Knowing our great need is what motivated the Father to make provisions for our forgiveness and salvation through the cross of Jesus. We’re told that in that watershed event in history, our sins were nailed to that cross and all our wrongs were atoned for. No wonder God’s children make so much over the cross. (You’ll enjoy checking out Colossians 2:13-15 on this subject.)

Now, if our Heavenly Father can turn loose of the past–even forgetting what He has forgiven, according to Hebrews 10:17–surely we ought to be able to also.

The wonderful Dutch believer, Corrie ten Boom, imprisoned by Hitler for secreting Jews out of Holland, then released by a clerical error, and who spent the next several decades urging the Germans to seek forgiveness and to accept God’s forgiveness, had a wonderful line that fits here.

Frau ten Boom would refer to the line from Micah 7:19, that He casts all our sins into the deepest ocean. “Then,” she would say, “He erects a sign: ‘No Fishing Here.'”

Leave it alone, friend. It’s in the past, God has forgiven it, and you have forsaken it. Leave it there.