But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
    my Lord has forgotten me.”
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
    or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
    yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands;
    your walls are continually before me. Isaiah 49:14-16

When I write my sermons or articles for publication, I always leave the title and the introduction for last. My process is to let the theme emerge as I reflect, research, and write the sermon. Recently, I wrote in my notes, “Don’t forget to remember.”

“Don’t forget to remember”—that’s pretty good, but it sounds like a country song.

So, I googled “Don’t Forget to Remember” and discovered that Carrie Underwood has a song called “Don’t Forget to Remember Me.” Of course, there is a country song about this. There is a country song about every aspect of life, isn’t there?

According to family lore, my brother, my little sister, and I all fell asleep in the pews of the church during my dad’s sermon when I was three, my brother Jay was two, and my sister Robbie was one. When it came time to go, my parents each picked up a sleepy child and loaded them into the car to go home. They must have been visiting with late-leaving church members as they loaded their bundles of joy into the car, because when they got home to unload sleepy children, they only had two of the three. They accidentally left my little sister, Robbie, asleep on the pew in the dark, empty church. Two out of three is not a bad batting average in baseball, but it doesn’t work for parenting.

The race was on to get back to my little sister before she woke up in a dark church, and thus caused psychic damage that therapy would never be able to fix. We did, and my sister is barely messed up to this day.

So, apparently, a mother can forget a child.

Some human mothers are bad, and they abandon their children. But even some good mothers will forget you due to age-related diseases, or they will eventually die before you and abandon you.

You see, eventually, you lose your mother. Mother love seems unconditional. It seems indestructible, but it’s not because human beings aren’t indestructible.

If you ever watch a nursing mother, you see it in a way that the mother herself can’t. You see the radiance in her face. God has the audacity to say, “That’s just a dim hint of my delight in you.”

If you lived moment by moment with the bedrock certainty that a Person of that magnitude loved you with that depth—would it change you?

One of the most frustrating things about being a parent is that you’ve made sacrifices, so your whole life has changed, and yet all your sacrifices are completely invisible to the child.

When our granddaughter, Cora Lee, was a baby, we did summer daycare for her parents while Mindy and Caleb were at work. Every morning, I sat in my chair reading when Mindy drove up, brought that precious baby into our house, and sat her down in the chair next to me. Mindy stood there on one foot, then the next. She bent down and cooed at Cora, touched her face, wiped her slobbery mouth with the back of her fingers, stroked her hair, and told her at least 75 times, “I love you, Baby.”

She glanced at her watch and moved towards the door, and then, standing in the doorway, glanced back and said one more time to that little girl still strapped in her car seat, “I love you, baby.”

Let me ask you a question. When baby Cora is 14 years old and wants to wear something to school that is inappropriate, when that teenage girl named Cora wants to hang out with friends past a decent hour on a school night, and Mindy says, “No.” Do you think Cora will remember the morning routine Mindy went through when she was a baby? Do you think Cora will remember and have an inkling of the sacrifice Mindy made to care for, nourish, love, and adore that baby every day of her life?

When Cora is 14 years old, will she remember the 75 times Mama said, “I love you, baby,” standing in my house every morning in the summer of 2020? A child doesn’t understand your sacrifices, any more than a fish can understand what water is because a fish knows nothing but water. And we don’t often understand God’s great love for us on an infinitely larger scale.

So, how do I know for sure that God really loves me?

Read this out loud and slowly, “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.”

At first, that looks like just another lovely metaphor about His devotion. In ancient times, sometimes a master would tattoo his name on the back of a servant’s hand but never did a Master tattoo the name of a servant on His hand.

Never.

We might think, “Isn’t that beautiful? Another metaphor of God’s love.” No, it’s not a beautiful metaphor. It’s a horrible metaphor. Do you know why? It doesn’t say tattooed. It says, “… I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands…” The word inscribed is a very specific Hebrew term that means carved with a hammer and chisel or with a spike.

Why in the world would you conjure up the image of someone out of love letting people take a hammer and drive a spike right into the palm of their hands?

Would God really do that? Yes.

Where in the world did God do that? Calvary.

Every strike of the hammer on the head of the nail through the hands of Jesus showed that He knows your name, and He knows your address.

Trust God to remember you.