Ashes, For All Fall Down

Who is a God like You, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of His inheritance? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. — Micah 7:18-19

One of the horrors of having a good memory is that we tend to remember. I can give you my university student ID number which is not my Social Security number and for which no one has asked since 1975. I remember the phone number that I had for a couple of years back in the late '70's — partly because the last six numbers were 96-48-24, in that order. The first digit was an 8 — 3*8, 6*8, 12*8 — it was a thing of beauty. Even the area code added up to eight. Without question, until I got the landline number I have now, that was the best phone number I ever had. Of course, these days I have a lot more phone numbers to remember and, with every dinky cell phone having its own contact list, phone number memorization isn't so vital. My wife was always astounded that I was able to recall numbers, but one of my tricks was that I usually had to get only the last four digits prior to the proliferation of area codes and exchanges that cells have stimulated.

Back in school, I could, during a test, often see the page in the book where the answer could be found. Naturally, I had a lot fewer books back then. I was the same way with the Bible, seeing a quote in the approximate physical location on the page and relative to the front and back covers, even when I could not recall the reference. That was back when I had one old hardcover copy of the KJV that I used all the time.

I remember things that I wish I could forget — ugly things I've done and said, sins and errors that still reverberate through my life and, even worse, through the lives of others. Then there are things I probably should forget — you know, now that I am a well-respected, grandfatherly Christian sort. There are the jokes we told one another, the parties, kisses in parked cars, and movies I never really saw at the drive-in. There are skills I should forget, like how to roll a number on a rubber raft in the dark, how to pick a lock, or the exact moment to move a chair out from under someone sitting down. I remember the taste of a first cold beer on a hot day down on the river and the cool fire of sippin' whiskey by the evening blaze.

We had an office manager who was quite an attractive young lady. One Friday she wore leather pants to work — nothing gauche, but they did fit, shall we say, "quick". She had her hands full of files when she got to the exit. I was heading out the same door at the time — quite innocently. She was in front of me. I was going to step around her to open the door which had a lever instead of a knob. "Oh, no," she said, "I can get it." She backed up to the door and opened it with her butt, looked up at me and smiled.

"That," I said, "is just showing off. But it is impressive." Obviously, twenty-plus years later, I still remember it.

Sometimes I ask the Lord to purge my memory, to let me forget all the failures and even the distractions. Joseph, after enduring so many trials, named his elder son, Manasseh, saying, "God has made me to forget all my troubles in my father's house". Joseph could forget the wrongs done to him, the treachery by his brothers, their envy and animosity. He forgot only those things that came between him and others, for those are also the things that would have come between him and God.

And God, too, forgets. Isaiah said, "...[F]or You have cast all my sins behind Your back." In doubting that God does forget, I'm a little like Joseph's brothers in that they doubted Joseph had forgotten the little episode of being thrown in the well and sold to the Ishmaelites. I've always thought that the worst moment of Joseph's life was probably not being thrown in the well or getting sent to the dungeons for a crime he didn't commit, but that one moment when his brothers pulled him out of the well. Don't you figure that he thought they had been playing a joke on him, and they were about to let him go back home? He would have been thinking better of them. Then the chains were locked on, and he was dragged away behind a camel, able to look back for an hour and see his brothers standing around laughing about how they had finally gotten some profit out of the favorite. What an utterly dismal memory that must have been.

But Joseph did forget, not the episode but the negative intent. He forgot his own toxic bitterness. When Jesus said on the Cross, "Forgive them for they know not what they do", He could easily have paraphrased Joseph, saying, "Forgive them. They mean it for evil, but I know You, Father, mean it for good." The Bible says that a woman forgets the pain of her labor the moment she has her child in her arms. Again, it doesn't mean she forgets the travail, but she does not regret it. She is not embittered by it.

Memory is a blessing; so is forgetfulness. God says that if I will not remember the wrongs done to me, He will not remember the wrongs I have done to Him. If I cannot put my bitterness behind me, I hold my own sins always before His face.

Tomorrow many of my brothers and sisters will have a little cross of ash upon their foreheads, ashes of repentance and humility. In that little fire, literal or figurative, let us burn all tainted memories. We need not worry about loss for pure things will always pass through the fire unharmed. What will be consumed and turned to ashes are the impure, the hurts, the dirty deeds, the bad intentions. The ashes are a sign that we have let the fire purge us, that we forget all that has been burnt up and dispelled in smoke and wind.

As we relinquish to the flames the trespasses done against us, our own transgressions are turned to ash as well, trodden under foot and washed away into the vast, forgetful sea.