Some Things are Easy to Forget

One of my favorite songs is about nine minutes long - actually, most of my favorite songs are six to nine minutes long because they are story songs; but I can't find this particular song on youtube, so you must go find Waterdeep's 1995 album 'To Chase Away the Birds' and listen to my favorite track, 'On a Night that Felt Outdated' - and not just because they sample a line from Bob Dylan's 'All Along the Watchtower'. The song records a story of a lost woman, alienated from her husband, following her fall into an adulterous relationship and subsequent prostitution... and the glimmer of hope that she is not too far gone to receive redemption. The story pulls on the same themes as are found in Ezekiel 16, where God portrays his relationship with Israel as one of a husband and his wife, who has abandoned him for her own pursuit of sexual pleasure, forgetting his long-standing care and love, from the fact that that he had saved her from death as a newborn infant to his provision of her every need.

I was singing along with the song while I was driving home this afternoon, and I was struck by the lyrics in the chorus:

Some things are easy to forget
even if they're bigger than the now,
she has tried to remember them
but she can't remember how.

Some things are incredibly easy to forget... you never want to remember them, they've been buried so deeply that they may never see the light of day again. Some things shouldn't be easy to forget, yet it seems they're incredibly difficult to remember. I'm thankful that God is not afraid of calling us whores in Ezekiel 16, because that is what I was without his grace and mercy. I'm thankful that in 1 Peter 2 he calls us his people, and reminds us that we have received mercy. These are things I don't always remember.

But I suspect that for some people - maybe especially for those who have been deceived and wounded very deeply - there is a very real connection between what they remember and what they forget. That glimmer of hope that comes at the end of the song, or at the end of Ezekiel 16, is sometimes a more difficult pill to swallow than the lies that can keep us living as slaves of sin and brokenness, rather than to receive the grace of God that is so freely given in Jesus Christ.

Maybe those wounds seem too deep to ever heal - and more than likely they will leave a scar - but we'd rather forget than relive the terror of our sin, or the infliction of someone else's sin. And maybe in the struggle to keep our head above water, to not drown in fear and hurt and desperation to at least pretend to be whole again, we also forget the one thing that can help to make us whole again. We buy the lie that there is no hope.

The line quoted from Dylan's 'All Along the Watchtower' goes like this:
There are many here among us, even right now,
Who feel that life is but a joke
Oh, but you and I, we've been through that
This is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
you know the hour is getting late.

Let us not believe the lie that we are ever beyond the redeeming and healing hand of God. Let us never forget that he is willing and able to do what he has promised: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30).