Easily Forgotten Man

Sometimes I think the deepest anxiety we carry today is about being outnumbered by those who shape the world’s meaning and control the story. They define what it means to be human, speak for the future, and stand at the center of the world’s attention. And we who live by a different story begin to feel like oddities—these people devoted to an ancient book, carrying a vision of the human person that no longer registers as plausible, let alone essential.

I wonder if we’re being foolish. Whether we’re unneeded. Unnoticed. Easily forgotten. I wonder if—even if we were to live with conviction, or remember with care, or love what is truly good—nothing would depend on it. Everyone outside this Body will control the story; they’ll be more present to the world as its representatives of humanity; they’ll define what it is to be human and therefore become stumbling blocks to us Christians when we look around and wonder: do we have an outsized view of ourselves if each individual human being has a history that is infinitely grand? I fear we can look around and see this sea of people, this mass of humanity stretching further back in time than we Bible believers suppose, numbering in the billions—and that if we take each individual as seriously as we take ourselves, that there won’t be any room for some special providential history given that the propagation or tradition of the story we define ourselves by is pathetically, infinitesimally, small.

Then there’s something else going on, making us anxious: remembering no longer seems to require a witness. What was once preserved through memory, reverence, and pain is now flattened—replicated, reframed, and circulated without asking anything of us, so we can begin to feel replaceable even in our deepest thoughts by AI or even by the sheer volume of production from other people.

But I don’t believe we were made to disappear into the crowd or to question the goodness of our inheritance simply because it is small. I believe we were made to remember, to interpret, to suffer rightly for the sake of what is good. History is not just information—it is an interpretive act. It’s the attempt to listen to the past with moral attention, to seek meaning in what others endured. Through that work, we begin to see virtue—not as theory, but as something lived: courage under threat, fidelity under trial, love sustained through loss. And we see, too, the shape of the theological virtues—faith, hope, and love—threaded through real human lives. Not as ideals floating above time, but as lights that flicker on in the dark, again and again.

At the center of this interpretive life stands Scripture—the one stable Word across the ages. It is not simply historical; it is interpretive, formative, and eternal. It does not shift with the culture or require our cleverness to survive. It does not merely inform us—it confronts us. It reveals what we are inclined to hide, questions what we assume, and speaks with the authority of the One who made us. This is what I want my students to see: The soul becomes diffuse in a world where everything is archived but nothing is received. They are not here on earth with the ultimate aim of being noticed. They are here to receive the Word and bear witness—not to complete any story, but to enter one as interpreters and stewards; not to dominate history, but to be shaped by its testimony.