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When my father died suddenly almost 30 years ago, I flew home to help my mother with the arrangements and with her sudden grief. She couldn’t sleep. My favorite philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, once wrote that God is a “tender care that nothing be lost.” I had heard an anecdote about a time when Whitehead suffered from insomnia. He bought volumes of theology and read them. The reading cured his insomnia. I cured my mother’s insomnia that day by reading to her a long section from Whitehead’s Process and Reality. As she fell asleep listening to the drone of my voice, I lingered on the passage about God’s tender care that nothing be lost. Our memories of my father would be remembered by God’s tender care and love.
God’s global, universal memory encompasses all of us in loving detail. We will not be another number. When God remembers, God also saves. All of us. Forever.
This message is excerpted from “Forgotten stories” by Ann Milliken Pederson in the September 2020 Gather magazine.