The Blessing of Being Forgotten

A couple of years after my wife and I were married, we were doing the normal newlywed summer experience of attending friends’ weddings. And so, on a Saturday sometime in the spring, we found ourselves in a very “Southern” town. The ceremony went off without a hitch, the music was beautiful, and the couple said their vows. Upon completion, all the guests joined the couple and their respective families for a reception in front of the church. We had been to many of these before and knew what to expect: some good food, a hot afternoon (it was the South after all), and lots of small talk. However, on this particular occasion, I was struck by something I hadn’t seen at a wedding reception before. In the middle of the courtyard in front of that church was the statue of what I can only assume was a previous pastor. I remember wondering not who it was nor what was so special about him but rather at the enormous mutton chops that hung on the side of his face.

Years later, I was talking with a pastor friend and his wife. They had previously served at the church with the statue of “Mr. Sideburns,” and so I asked them about it. Of course, they were aware of the statue. They had seen it many times. But then they told me a fascinating detail — few in the church could tell you who the statue was, and the urban legend known around the church was that the minister who was depicted in the statue had commissioned it himself.

Now, I wasn’t there when the statue was commissioned, and I acknowledge my ignorance of the pastor’s motivation. However, it’s not hard to speculate what goes through a person’s heart and mind when they have a statue of themselves built. They want to be remembered. Or to put it another way, they are afraid of being forgotten.

It seems like our world plays off this fear. From Longfellow the poet who said, “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time,” to Maya Angelou, who challenged us by saying, “If you’re going to live, leave a legacy. Make a mark on the world that can’t be erased,” to movies like Gladiator that claim “what we do in life echoes in eternity,” we are encouraged to live in such a way that we will be remembered — or at least that our influence will be felt. I’m not saying that our lives won’t have an impact on those we encounter. After all, my children will bear the wounds that I caused as well as the blessings I brought. Yet will I have the same impact if I’m seeking to make that impact?

What if our footprints in the sand are erased by a small breeze? What about the fact that we have no say on whether what we do will remain or be erased? What if what we do in this life is not heard a generation after we’ve departed?

I remember an older man who was part of my community many years ago. He regularly talked about his children and grandchildren. But he didn’t talk about what was wonderful or unique about them; instead, he opined about the legacy he wanted to leave them. Yet, when I engaged with his children, it became apparent that for all his talk about “leaving a legacy,” they found him to be a burden, an annoyance, someone they, shamefully, rolled their eyes at. He was so concerned about being remembered as a man of wisdom, faith, and steadfastness that he forgot to just be present.

I’d like to think that in some way, somehow, I’ll be spoken of by people who are 50, 75, 100 years still to be born. But honestly, within a generation after my death, I will be forgotten. And what if there’s a blessing to being forgotten? Think about that for a second: could there be relief found in curtailing our attempts to leave a legacy?

Hear me out: can any of us bear the burden of ensuring our life will be remembered beyond our days?

Perhaps a better way forward might be to relinquish concern over how future generations will or will not remember us and instead be content knowing that we are remembered by God.

I find it beautiful how frequently the Bible gives us names of saints, church members, and co-laborers whom we know nothing about. Read the Old Testament chronologies. Or note the women and men who worked alongside the Apostle Paul. While the original readers and writers of those passages would’ve known these people, we’re left wondering what they did, why they were significant, and what their stories were. They’re just names to us. But to the Lord, they’re known and beloved.

These unknown people remind me of Francis Schaeffer’s essay “No Little People, No Little Places.” In God’s economy, there’s no such thing as a little person. Sure, I may not know their names or know what they’ve done, but God has written their names in his book of life. Maybe you feel forgotten, that your efforts are ignored, and you think, “No one sees my sacrifice, my efforts, my attempts at service and love.” That may be true — but those efforts aren’t hidden from the Lord. He sees your love, your sacrifice, your service, and to him it’s beautiful. Though you may be forgotten by man, you’re remembered by God.

I recognize that this pushes against our instinct to pursue meaning through our efforts. Francis Schaeffer once wrote in “Death of the City”: “All men … have a deep longing for significance, a longing for meaning … no man, regardless of his theoretical system, is content to look at himself as a finally meaningless machine.”[1] That longing for significance and meaning is ultimately not the problem. The problem is that we seek to satisfy this longing in the wrong things: notoriety, legacy, being remembered, “greatness” (however we might define that). What would happen if we truly believed that God remembers us even if we’re forgotten in a generation? I suspect we wouldn’t stop caring about how our actions impact others. We would simply be more concerned with whether our lives are oriented towards pleasing the Lord than impressing the peanut gallery.

Perhaps that sounds like a burden of its own. Yet there is tremendous freedom here, especially for those of us who’ve been ignored, forgotten, or seen as having little importance in the world. We are remembered by God, not because of anything we’ve done or accomplished but because of his grace. After all, what causes God to write our names in his book of life is not our work but Christ’s work on our behalf. We are told in Revelation that those who will dwell in God’s new heaven and new earth are those whose names “are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Rev 21:27). They have been freed from striving endlessly after the acclaim of men and can instead rest in the finished work of Christ. Though we may be forgotten by man, we can rejoice that by his grace, we are remembered by God.

[1] Francis Schaeffer, Death in the City (InterVarsity Press, 1970), 98.