This is the art of the Christian life: reconciling what needs to be remembered with what needs to be forgotten—concerning both our faithful God and our sinful selves. Jesus and his disciples point us to this reconciliation of remembering and forgetting at the Last Supper and the days that follow Jesus’s death. As Jesus—a real-life flesh and blood reminder of the Passover Lamb—instructed his disciples as they took the bread and the cup.
In February of this year, I was diagnosed with a rare type of brain cancer. I am, quite literally, one in a million. A seizure brought me to my knees and was the catalyst for the discovery. A brain biopsy and a craniotomy followed in the days and months after. I went from being independent and in the prime of my life, just on the cusp of turning forty, to being dependent, unable to drive, living with family, and staring down the face of a life-altering diagnosis that is presently incurable. My tumor, well over two inches wide, sits in the right frontal lobe of my brain near the motor control strip, impairing most of the movement on the left side of my body. When I woke up from the craniotomy in April, I could not so much as wiggle my left toes or lift my left hand off the hospital bed. Even two months later, I didn’t have the strength to open a Ziploc baggie or the motor control to type with both hands.
Looking back on the months following the surgery, which were filled with countless rehab and doctor’s appointments, my memories of that time are like the Bermuda Triangle—memories went in, but most have never come out. I’ve sent out mental search parties to see if I can find the wreckage but all I come back with are remnants of debris—hazy, vague, and tattered around the edges. A doctor’s appointment here. A hard conversation with my family there. And then nothing but vast expanses of open water and tears in between. So much has vanished from the recesses of my brain, maybe to never surface again.
Perhaps it is more of a gift of grace than I realize that those memories haven’t surfaced and remain at the bottom of the mental ocean. Even the prophet Isaiah commends God’s people to forget the former things, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isa.43:18–19). As harsh at it may seem, maybe cancer is the “new thing” springing forth in my life, if only I would have eyes to perceive it as such rather than rail against it. I hold fast to the truth that he is making a way in this wilderness season, and maybe it is for the better some memories from those months are lost, perhaps forever. Maybe the mental search parties can quit working overtime.
On the other hand, some of my memories are very vivid. I remember my first seizure well, as the type of seizures I experience impact only one side of my body, and I never lose consciousness. I had a string of four seizures in the space of two weeks in late May, and I can recall every one of them. Why does my brain remember some memories, but forget others? There’s obviously a science behind what our brains do and do not remember, especially concerning trauma, and people far smarter than I can unpack that elsewhere. I’m more interested in how all this ties into our spiritual ability to remember and forget.
There’s a long list of things I’ve been asking of God since February, like healing, strength, coordination, and recovery of cognition. However, in more recent months, one prayer has chiefly risen to the surface, one which echoes bits of Isaiah 43: “Help me remember what needs to be remembered and help me forget what needs to be forgotten.”