By Tom and Amelia Boomershine

A basic skill for a storykeeper is to remember the stories. Many people think they can’t remember things. But for most people that’s not true. Remembering a story is a simple process of getting it inside your mind and your heart.

We know from dreams and memories associated with popular music and memory flashes that many stories are present in our memory. The secret is to know how to retrieve them.

Linking events, words, concepts, and similar experiences establish memory hooks that enable us to retrieve memories stored in our brains. Connections between biblical stories and our personal and family stories establish those links and will help us remember the stories.

Children have an amazing capacity to remember things. They learn words, stories, and songs with great ease and speed. Children can hear a story once or twice and tell it back very accurately. Research on children’s memory has shown that the greatest ability to acquire language and learn stories is from the ages of two to eleven. Stories that children learn at an early age, especially stories about God, become things that they will remember for the rest of their lives.