Remembering Our Name

“What’s his name?” I asked Paul.  

“I can’t remember,” he answered. 

My college roommate, Paul Oglesby, and I were looking at a group photo from our fraternity forty-six years ago. 

“I can’t believe you remember as many as you do,” Lori and Alix (Paul’s wife) said almost in unison.

For years, I wondered what had happened to my college roommate, Oglesby (as I called him). We had been in the same pledge class  (Sigma Chi) at Baylor University. 

Then, after graduation, we lost track of each other until a couple of years ago. I felt like an F.B.I. agent as I searched “Paul Oglesby.” Finally, our wives helped, and they put us together by comparing pictures from social media. 

And so, when part of the Oglesby clan (daughter, son-in-law, four grandchildren) visited our part of the country on vacation, we met them at Mammoth Cave, where we all took a deep dive into the caverns.

 Though it had been years since Paul and I had seen each other, we picked up where we left off. “Don’t park there, you Jack-meat,” Oglesby yelled at me when he rolled down his car window. Lori looked at me askance as I explained, “Jack-meat” was a word we invented in college for bad drivers— a combination of Jackass and Meathead.

Later that night, at the hotel, we reminisced. Lori and I had brought some pictures of our fraternity days. Lori and Alix grinned as Paul and I struggled to remember. “Who is that?” one of us would puzzle. “I remember, that’s, oh, you know…’ what’s his name.'” Most of the names we could remember, but some slipped away.

It wasn’t that we were stupid. I had told Lori that I was an average student who tried hard. “But Paul was brilliant, and like me, he tried hard but was more gifted than I was.” 

Paul earned a Ph.D. in physics (University of Arizona) and worked, among other things, on National Missile Defense, highly classified stuff that he still keeps to himself. Paul had traveled all over the country, sharing his research with the nation’s top military brass before he retired. 

And so there we were, two guys with different Ph.D.s scratching our heads, struggling to remember once familiar names.

As we chatted, our conversation ran the gamut from our favorite sports teams to deeper subjects, like can a physicist believe in God (Paul does) to Paul trying to explain in terms I could understand my questions about simulation theory (the theoretical hypothesis that we humans are living in an advanced, computer simulation, perhaps created and overseen by a higher being.)

“You two are so different but so alike,” Alix observed. 

“I tried to answer ‘the how’ about the universe; David sought the ‘why,'” Paul quickly responded.

My journey into the “why” was limited by the nature of the subject matter: God. Immediately, Paul quoted the famed quantum physicist Richard Feynman, who said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” So it is with the “Why?”

Job, struggling with why bad things happen to decent people, finally concluded: “God is greater than we can understand” (Job 36:26). Isaiah seemed to agree, even as he chastised a disobedient people while holding out hope for them: “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” he said, speaking for God, “and my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine” (Isaiah 55:8).

But this God has revealed what we need to know, though certainly not everything: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us…” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

For me, the Why is answered by the Who: Jesus Christ, in whom it all comes together, the perfect revelation of all human searching for the good, the true, and the beautiful, all fulfilled in this messianic figure who took the judgment for us—the imperfect, the flawed, the marred—and who in his resurrection gives us life eternal. 

While some of our frat brothers’ names remain lost in the recesses of our memory, Oglesby and I took solace in our God,  who will never forget our name, the God Isaiah says calls us “by name” (Isaiah 45: 4). 

The God who forgives.

And yet always remembers.

Each of us by name.