“I Don’t Want Them to Forget Me”

”O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book!
O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!”
– Job 19:23-24, a portion of the Alternate OT reading appointed for this upcoming Sunday, the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

The Longing for Record/Witness

Job’s cry cuts through the centuries with startling immediacy. As most of us recall, by chapter 19, Job has been stripped of everything. Not just his possessions, his children, his health—but also his identity. His good name is destroyed. His ties to family and friends have dissolved. His body is “dis-integrating,” being taken apart, reduced to bones and teeth and raw flesh. And the dismantling goes deeper than the physical. Job’s entire self—his understanding of who he is, how the world works, who God is—has collapsed. And in this extremity, he becomes desperate for something to remain, some witness that will outlast the wreckage.

My commentaries indicate the Hebrew carries a wordplay that English translations struggle to capture: Job’s testimony could be read as le-ed—“as a witness”—or as le-ad—“forever.” Perhaps both. Job wants more than mere posterity; he wants truthful witness that endures. He wants someone, sometime, to know: This happened. I was here. I did not deserve this. I held on.

Most of us will never face Job’s extremity. Yet embedded in his desperate plea is something deeply human that transcends his particular catastrophe—the longing to be known, to have our lives witnessed, to matter beyond our mortality. We recognize it, even when our circumstances differ radically from his.

Three Voices of Witness

More than thirty years ago, I visited Mrs. Ragan at Hillcrest Nursing Home in Durham, where she was spending her final months. She was 104 years old. Our friendship had developed over several of pastoral visits—she was sharp, engaging, delightfully opinionated about everything from politics to literature. But on this particular day, as I approached her room, she reached for my hand with surprising urgency and whispered, “I don't want them to forget me.”

Mrs. Ragan hadn’t suffered like Job. She’d lived a remarkably blessed life—seven daughters, all of whom had grown into fine women. One had even married at 86, after being widowed for years. Yet within Mrs. Ragan was that same primal fear: being forgotten, becoming as though she'd never existed.

In conversations with her daughters during those final months—women who were themselves in their seventies while I was then in my early forties—I heard a different dimension of this longing for witness. They worried that the nurses, however well-meaning and gentle, saw their mother only in her frail state. The staff couldn’t know how vibrant Mrs. Ragan had been, what an entertaining conversationalist, how fully she’d lived for more than a century. Her daughters wanted a record too, not for themselves, but out of love—they wanted the world to see their mother in her fullness, not reduced to the diminished person in the bed.

Three voices, then, each wanting witness for different reasons. Job needs vindication, proof that he existed and that what happened to him was unjust. Mrs. Ragan fears erasure after a long, blessed life. Her daughters, motivated by love, want their mother known truly. The common thread: we all need to be known in our fullness, not reduced to our present diminishment.

Job’s longing for a record and Mrs. Ragan’s fear of being forgotten spring from different soil, but they share common roots. And both lead us back to Job’s most famous words—words we think we know, but may have misheard."

“I Know That My Redeemer Lives”—Continuity, Not Resolution

From this context of desperation and longing, Job makes his famous declaration: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.”

If you’ve heard Handel’s Messiah, you can’t help but hear the soprano’s soaring voice proclaiming these words with triumphant certainty. Easter hymns have shaped our ears to hear Job’s cry as resolution, a sudden burst of faith breaking through his despair like sunrise after a long night.

But that reading may domesticate Job’s speech into something more comfortable than the text warrants. Biblical scholar Anna Marsh suggests that we consider this moment as continuity rather than transformation. Job isn’t suddenly finding faith again or breaking through to acceptance. He’s doing what he’s been doing all along—refusing to let go of God even while accusing God. “I know my Redeemer lives” isn’t, therefore, capitulation; instead, it’s Job still holding God accountable to be who God is supposed to be. It’s almost defiant: “I know what redemption looks like—so where is it?”

This is the paradox of covenant faithfulness: holding onto God with one hand while shaking your fist at God with the other. Job has nowhere else to go but to the God he’s accusing. And he refuses to make God’s job easier by pretending everything’s fine or that he’s moved past his protest. The famous line isn’t the end of his lament—instead, it’s part of his lament.

The Corrective: Against “Patient Job”

All too often, we’ve domesticated Job in another way—turning him into a model of patient endurance. “Job suffered greatly and still had faith, so can we.” It's become a cliché, this image of patient Job quietly accepting his lot.

But anyone who actually reads the book knows this misses the point entirely. Job isn’t patient. He’s angry, accusatory, relentless in his protest. He refuses every attempt by his friends to make his suffering make sense through conventional theology. He demands that God answer him, accuses God of injustice, rails against the cosmic unfairness of his situation.

At the end of the book, God vindicates Job for precisely this kind of speech. God tells the friends, “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” [Job 42:7]. The protest, the argument, the refusal to accept easy answers—that was faithfulness, not its opposite.

The message isn’t “suffer patiently and keep believing.” It's something far more honest and demanding: You can rage at God. You can demand answers. You can hold God accountable to be who God claims to be. And all of that—the protest, the insistence, the refusal to let go even while you’re shaking your fist—that is faith. Fierce, risky, faithful.

The Divine Witness

So what does Job discover in his desperate cry for a permanent record? The text suggests something unexpected: the stone inscription he craves gives way to something else entirely—encounter. “In my flesh I shall see God.”

Job wanted his words carved in rock with iron and lead, a testimony that would outlast everything. But what he declares—or hopes for, or clings to—is that God Himself will be the witness. Not an external record that survives him, but a face-to-face meeting with the One who has known him all along. The record becomes presence. The vindication becomes relationship.

This is where the theological movement of the passage takes us: being fully known requires divine witness. Mrs. Ragan had me, had her daughters, people who knew her in her fullness and would remember. Her daughters wanted the nurses to see what they saw. And I’m sitting here thirty-something years later, writing about her, bearing witness still.

But Job pushes beyond human witness to something even more fundamental. He will see God. And in that seeing, he will be seen—not just in his present wreckage, not just in his former prosperity, but in his full reality. The God who created him, who knows every detail of his life, who has been maddeningly silent through his ordeal—that God will stand as witness.

It isn’t the resolution we expect. Job doesn’t get his stone inscription. But he gets something stranger and more intimate: the promise of encounter with the One who has always known him completely.

Living in the Tension

The book of Job doesn’t neatly tie up all the loose threads. Neither should we. Job gets his encounter with God, but not the explanations he demanded. He gets his life restored, but not his original children returned. The text leaves us in tension, and I think that’s exactly where we need to be.

We may not suffer like Job suffered. We may be blessed like Mrs. Ragan was blessed. But we share the longing—to be known, to be witnessed, to matter beyond our brief mortality. Some of us come to that longing from places of pain, others from gratitude, still others from love for those we don’t want the world to forget.

Job teaches us that this longing itself is a form of faith—faith that meaning persists, that witness matters, that being truly known is possible. And he teaches us that we don’t have to resolve the tension between protest and trust, between shaking our fist at God and holding onto God for dear life. That tension, that refusal to let go even in our rage and confusion, is covenant faithfulness.

The stone inscription may not come. The permanent record we crave may take forms we never expected. But the promise remains: we will see God, and we will be seen—fully, truly, finally known by the One who has witnessed us all along.

Even when we can’t see it. Even when the vision tarries. Even when all we can do is hold on.