How Quickly We’re Forgotten

The Christian life is not about being remembered but about lifting the name of Christ above all else.

Our original Friday group. Mike is in the front on the left.

Three generations from now, most of us will be a nameless face in a digital (presumably) scrapbook that nobody can identify. You know this to be true because you’ve gone through the photo albums of your own grandparents or great-grandparents and couldn’t place names with faces.

I wrote those words in my devotional book Finishing Well: Living with the End in Mind quite a few years ago. And I was reminded of their reality recently.

For the past dozen or so years, I’ve been meeting with a group of Christian guys for lunch on Friday afternoons. We started with just five people. I had to take a break for a while, but later rejoined the group. Then, maybe six or seven years in, Mike had to step away for work and was only able to come back sporadically after that.

In the summer of 2023, we received the shocking news that Mike, who was in his seventies, died unexpectedly. We never did find out what happened. It caused me to reflect on what I knew about him.

Mike was a Little League baseball coach who loved his players. He once told me a story about how he wanted to see one of his players get into a private school (I can’t remember why) and his mother couldn’t afford it, so he wrote a check. Mike didn’t have a lot of money, but the sacrifice was worth it for him.

Once a year, Mike went on silent retreats to Minnesota. Those retreats meant a lot to him, and hearing him talk about those experiences afterward always inspired the rest of us.

Not long before Mike died, we met at a burger place in Omaha called Dinker’s with another friend. The place is old school, so much so that they only accept cash. I didn’t know that at the time, and I don’t really do cash, so I was in a pickle, so to speak, when it came time to pay. Mike whipped out a twenty and handed it to me, saying I didn’t need to pay him back.

The next time I saw him, we bumped into each other at a funeral. I just happened to have a twenty on me, so I did pay him back. We had lunch together in the social hall of the church that day after the funeral and got caught up on each other’s lives. Little did I know, it would be the last time we would ever see each other here on earth.

Fast forward to this year. Mike’s birthday is January 20, so when an offshoot of our Friday group planned to meet for dinner on that day, we wanted to celebrate Mike’s birthday to remember him. The plan was to share a story about him as we went around the table. Well, a couple of the original five couldn’t make it, so it turned out that I was the lone representative. That fact hadn’t dawned on me, though.

So when Mike’s name came up that night, nobody knew who he was. As I recalled this story on Wednesday to one of the original five, he pointed out exactly what I was thinking.

“And that’s how quickly it happens,” he said.

It’s not that Mike was forgotten in just one and half years, but since the group had turned over quite a bit and grown in the last decade, he just wasn’t on the new guys’ radar because they’d never met him or maybe only met him once in passing.

Mike’s life reminds me that the most meaningful legacies aren’t carved in stone or captured in photographs. They’re found in the lives we touch and the quiet ways we reflect Christ’s love. Whether it’s coaching Little League, helping a family in need, or inspiring others with our spiritual practices, these moments echo far beyond our own lifetimes, even if our names are forgotten. And that’s exactly how it should be.

Even if we are remembered by those who know us, nobody will know who we are in three generations. So why not get busy spending our lives right now for God’s work – whatever he’s put on our hearts?

The guy I met with Wednesday – the one who reiterated how quickly it happens – recently had a spiritual conversation with someone at his place of employment in which she expressed her desire to style hair for homeless women. My buddy was quick to point out how she could do so. I’m hoping she’ll follow through. The women she ministers to will probably never learn or remember her name, but that’s okay.

The Christian life is not about being remembered but about lifting the name of Christ above all else. As John the Baptist so humbly declared, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30 ESV).