Sin Makes You Stupid

When the Bible uses the term “sin,” it isn’t just talking about people misbehaving. Sin is a bigger, darker concept than just the idea of being naughty. Sin is an orientation away from God—essentially forgetting about God—and looking for meaning and identity in other things. Ancient Israel did that when they abandoned God and chased after numerous fertility gods, idols that seemed sexier and more functional than the God who had rescued the people from slavery in Egypt.

Sin also creates victims. Along with all of us sinners, there are those who are the sinned against. These are people who have been abused, neglected, oppressed, used, and discarded. This victimization often results in an identity grounded in pain, and pain always demands medication.

The biblical imagery of sin includes one of a person walking along a path that is sure to end up in a proper destination. And then the person decides to wander off that well-worn trail and do some exploring. Once off the path, the person becomes disoriented and loses all sense of direction. Fear and desperation emerge and the person embraces a new identity: A person who is lost.

Wilderness experts often caution people about what to do when they get lost in the woods, because too many people do the wrong things when they lose their way. Once off the trail, they panic, exhaust themselves, get dehydrated, and get even more lost than they were in the first place.

That’s a good biblical image for sin. And, as a wise man once said: Sin makes you stupid.

When followers of Jesus start following other desires, stupidity isn’t far from the scene. When our identity as kin to Jesus changes into something else—as lonely people, misunderstood people, needy people, addictive people, suffering people—our desires demand fulfillment from a source that is other than God. There are all kinds of stories of extra-marital affairs, substance abuse, thievery—you name it—that take place within the shared life of churches when people’s identities shift and wander off the path, the way, that is Jesus.

Psalm 73 says it well:

“When I was beleaguered and bitter, totally consumed by envy, I was totally ignorant, a dumb ox in your very presence.
I’m still in your presence,
but you’ve taken my hand.
You wisely and tenderly lead me,
and then you bless me.

You’re all I want in heaven! You’re all I want on earth!
When my skin sags and my bones get brittle,
God is rock-firm and faithful.” (vv. 21-25, The Message)

Ordinary Time - The Scent of Forgiveness

One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner.” Jesus spoke up and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher,” he replied, “Speak.” “A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he canceled the debts for both of them. Now which of them will love him more?” Simon answered, “I suppose the one for whom he canceled the greater debt.” And Jesus said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Luke 7:36-50)


Simon the Pharisee doesn’t appear to have just a friendly interest in Jesus. He’s a bit suspicious about him, and his concerns crystalize when the scandalous woman shows up invited.

Wealthier citizens in that time would keep their homes open—at least the outside patios—so that people could drop in and pay their respects, get counsel, or beg for alms. Simon probably didn’t expect that a prostitute would show up. A whore would be the worst of the unclean sinners (right along with lepers), and someone as respectable and religiously correct as Simon wouldn’t want any of her sin to get on him (ritually or literally).

But Simon feels that it’s acceptable for him to be in the company of Jesus. Jesus might be a spurious prophet, but he’s a religious type, and Simon has a responsibility to make sure that newcomers to the work of religion get vetted.

It appears that the woman also feels that it’s acceptable for her to be with Jesus, but for different reasons. Somewhere along the way she has come to understand something deep about him, something that has changed her life. She has no need to approve or vet him. She has come to love him, as she has been loved.

Simon, of course, is scandalized that Jesus allows the woman to even come near him. Jesus might have scandalized Simon even further by not only affirming her devotion over that of the Pharisee’s, but also by declaring their common need for forgiveness. The idea that he would share such common ground with a prostitute must have troubled Simon. I wonder what he thought of Jesus’ prophetic powers when he heard that.

Jesus would eventually go on his way, his stomach satisfied, but the details of the meal forgotten. But he would not be able to forget the woman any time soon. The ointment that she poured on his feet—a perfume that was very likely a tool of her trade, a scent that she had been using to allure men to her bed—would stay with Jesus for quite some time. The aroma of forgiveness would emanate from him, maybe even to the moment of his death.

Simon didn’t want the woman’s sin anywhere near him. Jesus carried the woman’s touch to the cross.

Jesus—Friend of Sinners.

Sin and Immigration

I once knew a man who told me that he had recently made a left turn from a parking lot and inadvertently crossed over a double yellow line. He then tearfully explained to his young son, who was in the car with him, that it was that type of thing that would send a person to Hell.

For this man, all infractions—including murder, theft, lying, and minor traffic violations—were sin, and sin is what sends a person to Hell.

In a way, he had a bit of a point. According to the Bible, sin is a general category that covers every act that is aimed away from the intentions of God. However, there are still differences. Murder and crossing a double yellow line, for example, have different consequences. They also differ in their fundamental nature.

Murder is a forbidden act in most societies. People groups might have different definitions for what differentiates murder from other forms of killing, but most would agree that the taking of a human life is essentially wrong.

There are other violations that are social in nature and subject to change. The man mentioned above might have made the same left turn the day before the lines were painted on the street and would not have seen himself barreling down the road to Perdition. There are certain social boundaries that we observe in human communities that are not universal in nature, but are functional (and sometimes arbitrary) and subject to change.

International borders are like that.

In the early 1800s, the western border of the US ended at the Rocky Mountains. Florida was Spanish territory. Much of the west and southwest belonged to Mexico. The border between Texas and Mexico was open until the 1930s. So a person could cross legally one day, and be in violation of the law the next.

I have spoken with people who insist that an undocumented worker (illegal immigrant, or whatever) stands outside of God’s favor and is in danger of eternal punishment on the basis of an unauthorized border crossing. After all, breaking the law is wrong and, therefore, sin. I’m sure that the people who hold this view never exceed the speed limits when they drive.

I’m happy to see a number of Christian leaders speaking responsibly in the current US work on immigration reform (see the “I Was a Stranger” challenge). I hope to see more Christians speaking with wisdom and theological sense into this issue. We US Christians need a lot of help in distinguishing between our partisan preferences and our call to be God’s people for the sake of the world. We also need help in our tendency to operate out of fear.

The challenge for we who follow Jesus is to act responsibly when it comes to social and political realities, but at the same time to remember that we stand in solidarity with all people, as co-humans made in the image of God. Our national boundaries are insufficient in defining people and separating them into categories that allow us to dismiss their humanity.

Ministry and Sin

When I was serving as a full-time pastor, people would occasionally apologize to me for using course language in my presence. Those apologies always amused me, since I am a veteran of the US Navy and have within me the ability to cuss with words that are better imagined than described. I have come to find swearing to be more amusing than offensive.

There’s this thing that people have with Christians in general and ministers in particular: We’re supposed to be shocked by sinful stuff and don’t want to get any of it on us. But the truth is, while we don’t want to be defined and formed by actions and thoughts that veer us away from God, we’re generally pretty cognizant of our own sin (even though we, like most people, tend to overlook some of our sins in favor of others). On top of that, all Christian ministry is engagement with sin.

All of it. Every &#%$ bit of it.

If sin is, as the Bible suggests, missing the mark, straying from the right path and, in general, forgetting about God, then sin is the context for all ministry.

In seeking to minister the healing love and touch of Jesus Christ in a broken and hurting world, we cannot avoid engaging with the sin that wracks the lives of human beings. And, in doing so, we can’t help but come away with blood on our hands, complicit with those whose lives are torn by the sin they have embraced and the sin that has been inflicted upon them. The sinner and the sinned against—those are our people.

For example: I believe that divorce is wrong. All the time. Every time. Without exception. Yet, I have counseled people to file for divorce when abuse and abandonment have destroyed what was once declared to be a marriage. I not only counseled those people to enter into the tragic and broken place of divorce, but I have also gone with them, providing what support I could. I didn’t tell them that divorce, for them, was to be a good thing and that they had followed all the biblical rules for divorcing. I told them that, together, we would be entering in a tragic place and would rely on God’s mercy, forgiveness, and grace to meet us on the other side.

For example: I believe that abortion is wrong. All the time. Every time. Without exception. But if someone’s daughter or granddaughter had become pregnant as the result of rape, or her life was significantly at risk because of the impending birth, I would give consideration to abortion, and would stand by the person should the decision be made to terminate the pregnancy. I would not call the abortion “good.” I would know that I was joining in on a willing journey into sin, crying out for God’s forgiveness as we made a painful and tragic choice.

For example: I believe that the laws of the land should be observed and obeyed. But if I were still serving as a pastor and an undocumented worker (code for illegal alien) came to my church, I would offer a safe place. I would not contact the authorities. And I would be a law-breaker. But the law of God’s universal love for humanity would trump my allegiance to the legal system. And if the authorities showed up one day to haul off the worker in cuffs, they would have to bring an extra pair for me. My sheltering of the stranger in the name of Jesus would not shield me from complicity.

Ministry draws us into close proximity to sin. It also brings us in close proximity to Jesus, who is already at work in the most broken, suffering parts of human life.

Jesus—the one called the Friend of Sinners. The one with our blood on his hands.

The Danger of Easy Answers

I have had the same conversation with three different people. The conversations were at different times and the people were not acquainted with one another. All three were gay.

Two were women and they told me the same story. They had been in traditional, evangelical churches for years and had struggled with their sexuality since they were children. After a while, overcome by the stress and anxiety of resisting what they had come to believe was an unavoidable reality in their lives, they accepted their gay identity. They also asked God to continue to love them, and believed that he had.

They left their traditional churches and went looking for new faith communities. They both told me that they had tried several gay-friendly and gay-specific churches, but had come away disappointed. Yes, they had been accepted there. But the churches, they claimed, were all about being gay. They said they wanted to be in places that were all about Jesus.

The third person was a young man. He was Catholic and had traveled 50 or 60 miles to visit a church were I happened to be speaking that morning. We talked between the services and he told me a similar story about being disappointed with the gay-friendly churches he had visited. He said to me, “I need to be in a place were I can be helped to know how to live.”

I wonder if we can do that? I don’t have any quick and easy answers regarding gay ordination or how churches will minister to gay couples and their children. But I wonder if our churches will be able to open their doors wider than before, recognizing that people like my three friends may come in. Can we accept them in order to help them orient their lives toward Jesus and to be encountered by the Holy Spirit? Can we trust God’s love and presence to bring transformation like we hope for everyone? Can we help them to know how to live?

The easy answers say that homosexuality is simply a choice to have sex with a person of the same gender. It’s a sin and it must be stopped in order for God to be accepting toward that person, or so the argument goes. If you read Mark Yarhouse’s very helpful book, Homosexuality and the Christian, you’ll find a greater complexity than you might have expected.

The easy answers also claim that everyone needs to be afforded the same rights, everyone’s equal, and everything’s okay. This way of flattening out human diversity and brokenness risks committing spiritual malpractice (as I posted yesterday). If we claim that everyone’s just fine as they are, then we’d better be right or we leave people to the ravages of their sin. And that means all of us.

There are no easy answers here. There really never were. If we look at what is happening around us and start asking God if he is present and doing something in the midst of significant social and religious disruption, we might find some surprises ahead of us.

A Lenten Reflection for March 20, 2013

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities. (Psalm 130)


I know people who have never been forgiven by those they have wronged. Even after great sorrow and repentance on the part of the offender, the one who suffered the offense withholds forgiveness. The people might be married to each other, co-congregants at church, or in some other relationship of proximity. And forgiveness never comes.

For some who have been sinned against, the pain might be too deep to forgive, at least in the short run; it could take time for that to happen. For others it becomes a form of power, keeping the sinner at bay and inside an eternal prison of unforgiveness.

For the sinner, the shame of the offense is compounded by the ongoing imprisonment of unabsolved guilt.

The psalmist speaks of God’s forgiveness in relation to the iniquities of the nation of ancient Israel. He rejoices that God doesn’t “mark,” or keep a record of the nation’s sins. After all, if he did, then it would be impossible for Israel to stand under the weight of its transgressions.

It is a comfort to apply such generosity to ourselves as persons. The people against whom we have sinned may not forgive us—we have no control over that. They might keep the record indefinitely, waving it in the air on occasion to make sure we don’t forget.

And the sinner doesn’t forget. Maybe never. I doubt that God actually forgets, either. He remembered Israel’s sins long enough for the people to be hauled off into exile. But in the end, he kept no record. When God forgives, the pardon is real, as real as the guilt that was the prerequisite for forgiveness. Once pardoned, always free.

That’s the amazing thing about admitting and confessing our sins. Once those sins are recognized and identified as something real and true, forgiveness becomes a possibility. How tragic it is when a person decides that everything is just okay and nothing requires pardon. That’s a weight under which no one can stand.

A Lenten Reflection for March 19, 2013

The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. (John 9:30-38)


It’s fun to read the story of the man born blind. After Jesus heals him, the Pharisees are enraged and want an accounting. The man gives them the facts, but they’re not satisfied.

So he lectures them. And they hate it.

After all, they’re the smart, holy guys and he’s the man who was, probably to them, an uneducated object of God’s wrath. That’s why he was born blind. He was afflicted because of some past generational shenanigan and God decided that someone—how about a newborn baby?—had to pay. How awesome.

I love it that the tables got turned on the Pharisees, but there’s something tragic to the story as well. The man has been, for his entire life, living at the margins of society. Now that he can see for the first time, he has to adjust to a sighted life and find a way to integrate in his context. He’ll need to develop some skills so that he can work. He’ll need to learn how to socialize like his neighbors. And he’ll need to learn how to worship with his community.

Except now, the Pharisees have driven him out. They’ve cut up his synagogue membership card.

How troubling this would be for the man. He could only believe that God had a hand in his healing, a healing that came through that wandering street preacher named Jesus. Having been restored to full humanity by the God he thought had forgotten him, he is now banished by the local religious elite. It doesn’t make sense.

But after the expulsion, Jesus took him in. He invited him into the embrace of faith and the man fell into Jesus’ arms. The Pharisees showed the man the face of the God they preferred—a God to which they felt they had aspired, one that kept his circle of acceptance tight and bounded. Jesus, however, showed the man the real face of God—it was a generous face of love, of healing, of initiated trust.

The man may have been born blind, but he seemed to recognize the real thing when he saw it.

A Lenten Reflection for March 13, 2013

“Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” (John 6:37-38)

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh . . . (Romans 8:1-3)


Our story of faith seems to move from the singular to the plural, from the particular to the universal. It moves from Abram to his descendants to all the families of the earth; it moves from Moses to the Hebrew slaves to the nation of Israel; it moves from Jesus to his followers to the church and to the world.

Paul tells us that Jesus came deal with sin. John tells us that Jesus came to be the savior of the world (1 John 4:14). The issue of sin moves easily from the particular to the universal and back again. Sin may be about me, but it’s about me in the context of us.

When we read the narratives of the gospels, it is a bit shocking to see how this dealing with sin comes about for Jesus. It comes about by sin having its way with him. The story culminates in sin winning the day, parading Jesus’ perfect, broken body around like a macabre trophy. Sin wins and Jesus suffers and dies.

I suppose that’s part of the reflective lament of the season of Lent. We hover over the passion narrative and watch tragedy unfold. This one sent as savior of the world, whose words and works rolls across the cracked and wounded skin of Israel like a healing salve, is suddenly despised by his own people and brutally, shamefully, executed. Somehow, in that sad drama, Jesus deals with sin.

It isn’t just that Jesus takes my sin and your sin away. It’s that Jesus allows the systemic, violent sin of the world to focus its fury on him on a particular day in a particular point in human history. In that particularity, in and through Jesus, God takes both sin and death into himself. He doesn’t heap sin and death on us; he embraces them willingly in order to rip out their teeth and ultimately destroy them.

We don’t see the turning of the tables until Easter. Yes, sin and death win on Friday. But their power is unraveled on Sunday. Yes, in the world there is still sin and, yes, we will still die. But neither sin nor death gets the last word in the story. God’s word is the last word.

And his word is Jesus.

A Lenten Reflection for March 5, 2013

For the people of Judah have done evil in my sight, says the Lord; they have set their abominations in the house that is called by my name, defiling it. And they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire—which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind. (Jeremiah 7:30-32)

I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us. (Psalm 78:2-3)

If there was ever an apt description of Hell, the valley of the son of Hinnom—or, Gehenna, as it was called in Jesus’ day—would be it. The ancient Hebrew people joined in with the idol worshippers in the local area and sacrificed their own children to a fire-filled god in that valley. In the time of the Roman occupation of Israel, Gehenna had become a flaming garbage dump, where refuse and the bodies of executed criminals rotted and burned day and night.

The account of this tragic failure of the people of God says something about the nature of evil. Some might say that God is in control, that he is sovereign, and all things come from his hand—good things for blessing, bad things for discipline and punishment. After all: Either God is in charge or he isn’t.

But in some ways, God isn’t in charge, at least not in that way. God may be sovereign, the rightful ruler of all things, but the realm over which he is king is a broken, distorted realm. The ancient Hebrew people embraced an evil that was of their own making, and it was an evil that had never entered God’s mind—we are told that he never commanded it. The people took upon themselves a sin that would mark them for generations to come and bring a curse upon the land where their children’s ashes were scattered.

And yet, God did not give up on the people. The psalmist writes, “Yet he, being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; often he restrained his anger, and did not stir up all his wrath. He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and does not come again (78:38-39).”

I am amazed that this dark episode wasn’t edited out of the Bible. It’s the dirtiest of all laundries and you would think that people would just want to forget it. But they kept the story alive for generations, reminding their descendants that the people of God are a broken people and capable of the worst evils imaginable. The most astonishing thing that would be passed on to each generation was that, in the midst of human failure, God remains faithful. God remembers our frailty. We might suffer the consequences of our embrace of evil, but God still forgives.

I wonder if the first 10,000 years or so of eternity is spent in abject amazement as people are confronted with the pure reality of both evil and forgiveness. We see them now abstractly; then we will see face to face.

A Lenten Reflection for February 27, 2013

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.
Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. (Romans 1:28-2:1)

Let your steadfast love become my comfort according to your promise to your servant.
Let your mercy come to me, that I may live. (Psalm 119:76-77)


It’s very helpful to have those people around. You know the ones—they’re responsible for doing all the bad things that we hear about. They provide us with the opportunity to objectify evil so that we know it’s out there with those people. That way we can be secure in the knowledge that it’s not in here with us.

But it is.

The apostle Paul was writing to help Jewish and Gentile Christians figure out how to live together, to be one body in Christ. In doing so, he leveled the moral playing field by making everyone culpable in acts of wickedness. Jesus did this too:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27-28)

The mind is tethered to the hand. I may not have committed adultery, but I have shared the same mind with the adulterer. I may not have committed murder, but in my anger I have opened the possibility of such an action. We’re not so far apart, those people and me.

I take comfort in remembering that, in Jesus . . . “we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:15b-16).

I can’t really think about those people without recognizing that I am kin to them. But the recognition is important. It motivates me to turn to God, who, in the person of Jesus, has entered into the entirety of human existence. In that turning he rightly judges my life and draws me into a life that is new.

Just as he desires to do for those people.

A Lenten Reflection for February 21, 2013

And when the Lord sent you from Kadesh-barnea, saying, “Go up and occupy the land that I have given you,” you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God, neither trusting him nor obeying him. You have been rebellious against the Lord as long as he has known you. (Deuteronomy 9:23-24)

“Mark this, then, you who forget God . . .” (Psalm 50:22a)

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest is still open, let us take care that none of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For indeed the good news came to us just as to them; but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. (Hebrews 4:1-2)


I once had a friend—a bartender, by trade—who defined sin as forgetting about God. It was a great biblical description, even though he might not have gotten it from the Bible. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, and it is still a definition that, for me, captures the essence of sin.

It’s interesting how we tend to think of the term, good news. Good news for us is gospel (from the old English, godspel, meaning good story) and we think that it emerges right out of the New Testament and starts with Jesus. And while Jesus clearly was the ultimate proclaimer and demonstrator of that good news that the kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15), the writer of Hebrews claims that such good news came first to the ancient people of Israel as they wandered in the wilderness.

The good news, of course, is that God is king, and there is no other—no Pharoah, no Ra the Sun king, no territorial gods, no Roman emperor. This news came to those ancient ex-slaves when they were dramatically rescued from Egypt. They were cared for in the wilderness and given a promise of a new identity and a land of their own.

Then they forgot about God. And so, it seems, can we.

We (certainly there is more than just me in this failure!) forget about God and get busy with things that we decide are more urgent, more important. Having tasted of the new reality of God’s kingdom we forget about him and find new gods in our political parties or national loyalties. Having loved our neighbor we begin to trust in the gods of fear and forget that God’s heart is for the world.

In a way, forgetting about God is worse than just resisting him and demanding our own way. At least in that resistance we are still oriented toward God, even in our rebellion. But once we forget him, we often don’t remember until things start crashing down on our heads.

I’d like to remember God all the time, even though I know that I don’t. I want to remember him when I suffer and also when I am comfortable. I don’t want my memory jarred by a disaster that forces me to see that God was the only true king regardless of my forgetting.

After all, I’m pretty sure that God remembers me.