Choose to Remember

In The Face by Angela Hunt, main character Sarah Sims has a choice to make. She was born with severe facial defects, raised in seclusion as an orphan, and now has opportunity to receive a face transplant and return to “real world.” In addition, she’s offered a drug that would “cut the cord between memory and emotion.” In other words, although she could recall her past, it wouldn’t be traumatic any more; the pain would be erased from it.

But her aunt/psychologist protests such action. “I would give anything to prevent my child from suffering… but who’s to say that a painful experience won’t serve a purpose in my daughter’s life?” she theorizes. “If we could resurrect Anne Frank, would you advocate giving her a drug so she could forget all about the unpleasantness of the Holocaust? All the people whose lives have been changed because of her story – can you honestly believe mankind would be better off if we’d eradicated Anne’s trauma?”

We Christians face Sarah’s choice. In Christ, we’ve been given a new face – made, in fact, into new creatures. Old things have passed away. Everything is new. And so we make haste to eradicate the past. We give up old, harmful habits and lifestyles. We learn to look at life through eyes of faith. We frequent counselors and devour self-help books in attempts to finally rid ourselves of the baggage carried over into our new lives. The goal? Eradicate the pain.

This is good… but maybe, in some ways, we’re too successful at it. We turn our backs on our personal Holocausts and fixate on the present presence of God and assurance of salvation and hope of heaven, and life becomes very, very tolerable… But is it possible to forget too much? To deaden the pain and despair of separation from God until they are just a vaguely unpleasant memory?

Sounds harmless, until we hear a sermon about those who are still lost and headed to an eternity of separation from God. Until we hear about those who have no access to the good news of the gospel. For how will we care, pray, give resources, even set our own “beautiful feet” on those darkened mountains, if we never remember what it was like without Christ? How will we empathize with their pain? How will we love our neighbor as ourselves, if we never again put ourselves in their shoes? If we spend all our time trying to forget the darkness in which they still live?

In The Face, Sarah Sims finally makes her choice. “If I cut the cord between the memory and this pain, will I not lose the warmth that comes from the feeling of being loved? The pain, the love, the loss are all braided together, and I don’t think I will ever be able to separate them.”

If we cut the cord between the memory of our lostness and the rescuing love of Christ, between our helpless despair and His dogged pursuit, will we care as much about those who have no access to Him? Will we long for them to know the joy of redemption? Will we spend ourselves for their sakes? If that’s what Christ is calling us to do, some of us had better choose to remember.