The sermons. My mother’s stories. The little sand table and Sabbath School for children. Adults’ conversations about religion. All the information I absorbed in childhood helped me sketch an image of Jesus with one major flaw: it was rendered in far too many shades of grey.
It is quite possible that the grey seeped in mainly from the words of grown-ups—well intentioned, to be sure, but themselves unable to discern much colour in a face they were struggling to imitate. It is also possible that my child’s memory selected and retained the more unsettling details, or the preconceived ideas about God the Father that inevitably spilled over onto God who came down among us in flesh and blood: the God who returns like a thief, on a day when you do not expect Him; the God who lays aside His role as Mediator to pronounce an irrevocable sentence on all those caught unprepared by the close of grace. The God of a holiness one cannot approach, who scrutinised the chasm between His perfection and my unworthiness, waiting for me to correct all my wrong deeds—with His help, of course, but also through painful effort, the balance between the two remaining, more often than not, an enigma.
Perhaps, in this portrait of a precariously-known God, the traits that intimidated me were drawn in strokes that were too heavy. Or perhaps, although I partly understood that salvation is the result of drawing close to the One who can offer it, I was still trying to tip the scales in my favour by sprinting—and mostly stumbling—through heaps of rules, without even needing to follow them to the bitter end to realise they never delivered what they promised.
For a while, His features, barely discernible beneath the dark primer of my painting, continued to trouble me—until, immersing myself in the weave of miracles in the Gospels, and then following Him through the meticulous and deeply sensitive analysis of The Desire of Ages written by Ellen White, I knew I needed a blank canvas. I knew I also needed many colours as well—warmer, more vibrant ones, capable of telling the story carried in the heart of someone who has met the most beautiful of men.
The God who remembers
What intrigued me about the series of Jesus’ encounters with the people of His time was the way He defied social and religious barriers and taboos in order to bring the hope of a new life even to those who seemed the least promising candidates for the Kingdom. But what truly captivated me was the way Jesus reshaped the destinies of those He met. What would have become of Peter if Jesus had left him to cast his nets night after night, instead of drawing him into His bold mission to save the world? What would have happened to the paralysed man who had waited 38 years for healing, unable to compete in the scramble to reach the pool whose very name sounded like mockery—Bethesda, the house of mercy—to those literally crushed by the law of the strongest? How long would the Samaritan woman have continued to live with the shame of marginalisation, slipping to the well at hours when she would meet no one, had she not encountered the One who made her forget her water jar by the well?
No one can say what would have become of all the people who met Him had Jesus not gone out to meet them, revealing to them the face of God. And in this chain of encounters, there is one that unsettles me every time I pause over it, as if I were reading it for the first time.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). In the pages of the Bible I find many prayers, and sometimes, when I feel I have lost all my own words, I borrow some of them. Yet among them all, the prayer of the thief on the cross in Luke 23 fills my eyes with tears every single time. Perhaps because somewhere deep in my heart it echoes the pain and the hope of someone no one had any reason to remember for good, someone clinging with his final breaths to a broken, dying Savior. Or perhaps because, in a sea of insults and curses, at a moment when not even the disciples believed Jesus to be the Messiah, a thief recognised Him as King precisely when He looked least like one.
Above all, though, it is because, in the midst of an agony I will never be able to grasp, a Saviour on the brink of death is ready to promise the repentant thief that He will remember him on the day of His return. Here, in the willingness of a dying God to listen, to forgive, and to offer a response full of comfort, I find the strongest confirmation of the promise He gives us through the prophet Isaiah: “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear” (Isaiah 59:1).
I make a habit of underlining—perhaps “tracking down” would be more accurate—in my Bible the verses that show God remembering one person or another and, as a result, acting on their behalf.[1] Even though I know He does not forget, the expression “He remembered” remains, for me, a steadfast promise that He carries me in His thoughts from now until the day of eternity, always acting for my good.
Repeated promises
Looking back on more recent or more distant moments when I felt—despite all evidence—that I had been forgotten by Him, I came to dwell on an experience in which He answered my own tendency to forget with a double assurance of His care. Caught in the grip of inner turmoil that seemed to offer no immediate way out, and carrying within me, unspoken, a version of Gideon’s question (“If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?” — Judges 6:13), I did what I had done so many times before: I searched for a word from Him in the devotional readings of that morning.
Often, I receive answers to my questions and needs through a verse or a biblical passage. At that time, however, I was rereading The Desire of Ages, and at the end of the chapter I had read that morning I came across a quotation I had reflected on many times before—one that seemed to place its finger precisely on my problem: “When we come to Him in faith, every petition enters the heart of God. When we have asked for His blessing, we should believe that we receive it, and thank Him (…) Then we are to go about our duties, assured that the blessing will be realized when we need it most.”[2]
The following morning, a second quotation from the same book resonated with the need in my heart, so I wrote it down—even though I knew it by heart—convinced that these words were a promise that God was faithfully accompanying me on this journey into the unknown: “God never leads His children otherwise than they would choose to be led, if they could see the end from the beginning and discern the glory of the purpose which they are fulfilling as co-workers with Him.”[3]
Before midnight, a message arrived in my inbox from afar, sent by a friend who always seems to know what to say and when to say it. Many times, his messages have reached me at just the right moment, on the winding paths of difficult decisions, so I opened it with the sense that it had come from somewhere deeper than its sender. In the opening lines, my friend wrote that he had a favourite quotation he wanted to share with me: “When we come to Him in faith, every petition enters the heart of God…” It was the very quotation I had underlined the day before. And that was not all. The message ended with another promise—that God always leads us along the path we ourselves would choose, if we were able, like Him, to discern the future.
At a lifetime’s and a death’s distance from His heart
My experience, the opposite of the one described by King David (“One thing God has spoken, two things I have heard: ‘Power belongs to you, God” — Psalm 62:11), is shaped by a faith that continually struggles to reach the size of a mustard seed. But above all, it is shaped by a Love that never tires of seeking me out and sustaining me when I long to begin again—a Love that assures me there is no possibility that He could ever forget me.
There is, however, a constant danger that lurks nearby. “Oh! my friends, is it not too sadly true that we can recollect anything but Christ, and forget nothing so easy as him whom we ought to remember?”[4] Charles Spurgeon once asked rhetorically. Whenever I study the life of Jesus, I am struck by the contrast between my own tendency to forget Him and the faithfulness with which He reassures me, again and again, that He remembers me. And how could He not?
He was born for me, lived for me, died for me, and rose again for me. And He will return for me—to place eternity into my hands—if I choose to spend the present moment remembering that no one, ever, can replace me in His heart.
Carmen Lăiu revisits the various encounters between Jesus and those who allowed themselves to be changed by Him, finding grounds for hope in the assurance that He always remembers us, even when we forget Him.