Forgotten Promises

As some of you may know, I go over to my dad's house once a week to help him out with shopping and some chores. This wee, my dad had a doctor's appointment, so I agreed to come early, but then life got busy and I totally forgot about both Dad's appointment and my agreement to come early. Thankfully, Dad texted me with a reminder and my sister gave me a ride, so I wasn't late, but it struck me how easily I could unintentionally break a promise, simply by forgetting that I had made it.

We make a lot of promises in this church. We call them covenants, and consider them sacred obligations. We receive blessings as we keep them and condemnation when we don't. Given how important it is for us to keep these promises, it's equally important to remember what all those promises are, yet we've made so many covenants, most of which were made several years ago for most of us, that it's easy to forget what all promises we've made.

I think that it might be a good idea to compose a list of the covenants we've made, just so we'd have a comprehensive list of the promises we told God we'd keep. Listing the baptismal and temple covenants won't be too difficult. The tricky part is that I'm not sure if I've made any eternally-binding covenants other than those ones.

Of course, as part of my baptismal covenant, I've promised to keep the commandments, or at least to be willing to and to strive to, so I should probably list the commandments as some kind of subsection under my baptismal covenants. But there are so many commandments, it would be nearly impossible to list all of them. Perhaps I could sum them up the way Christ did: Love God and love thy neighbor, but those are both so vague, it would still be very easy to forget many of the specific things we've promised to do.

I worry that I might be straying into Pharisee territory here. As I recall, they had very specific lists of commandments, especially regarding the observance of the Sabbath, and Christ scolded them for following the letter of the law, and not the spirit of the law. If I make a list of the covenants I made, I'll need to be careful to not just technically obey all the rules I promised to obey, but also to try to see the underlying reasons God asked me to keep those rules, and to stay in line with those reasons. Maybe I should add following the spirit of the law to the already-long-enough list of commandments I should try to remember and keep.

I hope that this doesn't matter as much as I worry that it might. As I understand it, God is more concerned with the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. God cares more about what kind of people we become than what we do or did. Following the letter of the law is a good idea, but only because it helps us follow the spirit of the law and to become good Christians. Then again, we've been warned to not take our covenants too lightly, and completely forgetting about something is about as lightly as you could possibly take it. Maybe I should list at least my baptismal and temple covenants, even if I don't include a comprehensive subsection of commandments. There are too many to list, and I'm sure that God, knowing how human we are, doesn't expect us to remember them all. If I'm wrong, I may be in trouble, but I think God is too forgiving to make a big deal about commandments that slipped our minds, especially if we're honestly trying to keep the commandments we remember.

Still, remembering and keeping our covenants is probably more important than trying to remember and keep all of the commandments. I should certainly make a list of the covenants I've made so I can remember them and make sure to try to keep them.