Ever been forgotten?  Sure you have.  It doesn’t have to mean you’re sitting at soccer practice waiting for one of your parents to pick you up, coming to find that mom thought dad was doing it and vice versa.  There are many ways to be forgotten – being placed on hold and nobody gets back to you, going into a business where the employee looks to help “the next person” and chooses incorrectly, spending time trying to make an impression with someone and the next time you see them they don’t remember your name.  We’ve all experienced it on some level.  At the lower stages – it’s an annoyance or a frustration.  Kick it up a notch and it can be more difficult to handle.  Go back to the soccer practice example.  Say you’ve made arrangements for a hotel stay in a city far away from home on a busy weekend – you arrive to check in, only to find that your reservation is not in the computer and they have no rooms.  But even that’s not the highest level this can take.

Being forgotten is at its absolute worst when love is involved.  Imagine going to someone you love and for the first time, opening up to them.  You expose your thoughts and feelings, providing them with total access to your heart.  So upon making that declaration, he or she steps away, providing you with no response.  Some might argue that walking away is silently screaming an answer, but it truth it is the most painful response you could give.  No response leaves you open, questioning, and hanging onto even the smallest bits of hope.  Don’t believe me?  I’m not suggesting you try this, but think of what would happen in the mind of your spouse, partner, or child if you totally ignore them the next time they told you they loved you?

Christ demonstrates the pain that comes from being forgotten while on the cross.  Throughout this entire sequence He has said very little.  What words He has spoken have been very controlled, very strong.  But throughout the entire process of his trial, humiliation, persecution, and execution, there is only one time where you discover a sense of hurt in his words.  We find it in Matthew 27:45-46:  “From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’—which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’”  Furthermore, when you think of hell and all of its descriptors, the most painful part of it – the one thing we can’t really understand about it is that in hell is total separation of ourselves from God – forgotten without any hope of ever being restored.

Christ knew full well the pain that comes from being forgotten.  That is why the Bible is so clear about how we will not be forgotten.  Hebrews 13:5 gives us this reassurance from God when it reminds us that He will never leave us, nor forsake us.”  Our Savior makes the same promise to his disciples and to us in Matthew 28: 20, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Thanks to our great and loving God, we can live confidently – knowing that we will never be forgotten.