Graven, Not Remembered

She said it out loud in the car once and then never again, because of how it sounded.

She said: I think He has forgotten what I am like.

Her sister, driving, said the sensible thing, which is that God does not forget anything, and she agreed, and they talked about something else, and that was three years ago and it has not gone anywhere.

Because that is not really what she meant. She knows the doctrine. She could recite it. What she means is subtler and worse and she has never found a way to say it that does not sound like unbelief.

It is this. There was a version of her that God knew well. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, in a flat with a radiator that clanked, praying about things in a way that felt like conversation with somebody who knew her habits. And she is sixty-one now, and the person He knew is a long way back, and what she is afraid of is not judgment.

It is that if she started praying properly again she would have to introduce herself.

That she would arrive and be a stranger with a familiar name. That He would be kind, of course, and would attend to her, and that there would be a gap where the knowing used to be, the way there is with somebody you were close to at twenty-four and meet again at sixty in a supermarket.

God takes up the exact fear

Here is why I wanted to get to this one with you. Your fear is not obscure. God raises it Himself, out loud, in the strongest terms available, and then answers it.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.Isaiah 49:15-16

Notice He picks the hardest possible case. Not a friend. Not a neighbor. A nursing mother, which is the closest thing to unforgettable that human life produces.

And then He does something startling. He concedes it. Yea, they may forget. He admits that even that can fail, which is a very honest thing to put in a book meant to comfort people. He does not build the reassurance on human reliability, because He knows it will not hold.

And then: yet will I not forget thee.

You have been carrying a fear God answered before you were born, and He answered it by name. That is not me stretching for a comfort; Isaiah 49:15 raises the forgetting question directly and settles it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it in a car three years after a sentence a woman never repeated.

Where He says He keeps you

Now look at where He says you are kept, because the location is the whole answer to the supermarket fear.

Graven upon the palms of my hands.

Not written in a file. Not remembered, which is an act of retrieval and can therefore fail. Graven. Cut in. And on the palms, which is the part of yourself you cannot avoid seeing, that is in front of you every time you reach for anything.

Being remembered requires somebody to go and look. Being graven on a hand does not. It is simply there, permanently, in the line of sight, at all times, and no gap of years can open in it.

You are not remembered by God, you are carried in a place He cannot look away from. The written word puts you on His palms rather than in His memory, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a sixty-one-year-old rather than a lovely image about people in general.

And let me deal with the flat and the clanking radiator, because there is grief in this and I am not going to pretend there is not. You loved that. The ease of it. The sense of being known by somebody who knew your habits.

That did not go because He lost the file. Some of it went because you got busier and more tired and less easily surprised, which happens to everybody. Some of it went with a body that has been through thirty-five more years. None of it went because a knowing lapsed on His side.

You were never a stranger and there has never been a gap to bridge. Scripture has Him cutting a name into His own hands rather than filing it, and the Holy Spirit has been the seal on that through every one of the years she has been afraid of.