Will You Remember Me?

I. THE QUESTION THAT HAUNTS THE HUMAN HEART

When I was a little boy, I used to imagine my own death. I didn’t understand theology, I didn’t know Greek or Hebrew, I didn’t know about immortality or resurrection. I only knew the ache inside a child’s heart. I would picture myself buried in the ground, the world going on without me, and I’d begin to cry because I thought: “Nobody will remember me. I’ll disappear. My name will fade.”

I didn’t fear pain.

I didn’t fear judgment.

What I feared was being forgotten.

And that fear, as I’ve learned over the years, is not unique to children. It’s one of the great unspoken anxieties almost every adult carries just beneath the surface of daily life:

Does my life matter?

Will anyone remember me?

When I slip beneath the soil, will the world forget I ever existed?

You can call it existential anxiety.

You can call it mortality awareness.

You can call it neurosis, insecurity, or fear.

But the Bible calls it something else.

It calls it a cry.

A cry that echoes from hospital rooms and gravesides and sleepless nights. A cry that rises from the cross itself — from the lips of a dying criminal who had nothing to offer Jesus but his bare, trembling humanity:

> “Lord… remember me.” —Luke 23:42

It’s the cry of the human race.

And maybe it’s your cry, too.

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Not long ago I moved to Southern California, and soon after arriving, I found the gravesite of my grandfather — Abner Dunn. I was named after him. I stood there among the rows of stones and felt something I didn’t expect: the shock of how much I didn’t know about my own family.

There were stories that had vanished.

Faces I had never seen.

Lives that had ended before mine began.

I realized I knew so little about the man whose name I carry. And it stirred something deep — a longing not just to understand him but to be connected to him. To be rooted in a family that mattered. To not be a wandering soul in history, but someone known… someone remembered.

A little farther back in my family’s story is a baby boy I never had the privilege to meet — my brother Phillip. He died in Surat, India, from pneumonia when he was just two weeks old. He is buried in an ancient Christian cemetery that goes back to some of the earliest believers.

I have stood on the other side of the world and pictured that tiny grave.

I have wondered about the mother’s tears shed over it.

And I have imagined the day when I can meet him in the earth made new and build sand castles with him — the childhood we never got to share.

Don’t tell me the fear of being forgotten isn’t powerful.

Don’t tell me the human longing to be remembered doesn’t shape us.

It touches everything.

It shapes our choices.

It shapes our prayers.

It shapes our faith.

And when you peel back all the layers — beneath the surface confidence and the religious vocabulary and the carefully kept composure — you’ll find a simple, trembling request:

“Lord… remember me.”

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But here’s where our struggle intensifies.

Modern Christianity, especially Western Christianity, tries to solve the fear of being forgotten with a doctrine that feels comforting on the surface: the immortality of the soul. The idea that you cannot really die. That you simply “transition.” That your consciousness floats upward at the moment of death and continues in some form of instant heaven.

People cling to that because it soothes the fear of disappearing. It promises we cannot be lost or forgotten because our souls live on automatically, by nature.

But if you listen closely underneath that promise, you can hear another truth whispering:

It avoids the real question: “What will you do with Jesus?”

If the soul cannot die, then we don’t need Jesus for life — we already have it.

If the soul cannot perish, then resurrection becomes an optional accessory.

If the soul cannot be lost, then being “remembered by God” becomes unnecessary.

Immortal-soul theology tries to silence the fear of death without calling us to the God who raises the dead.

It masks our fear with philosophy instead of healing it with resurrection.

It offers sentiment instead of salvation.

That’s why some people insist on it.

Not because the Bible teaches it — it doesn’t.

But because it feels easier than facing death honestly and running to Christ for life.

But the problem with comforting lies is that they comfort only until you begin to think deeply — until you sit with your own mortality, until you bury someone you love, until you stand by the grave of a grandfather or a brother or a child.