Remember Me
As I enjoy my first morning coffee and think about my last Woolworths Runaway deli shift, there is a deeper reflection underneath all of it.
On the surface, it was just another shift. Another day moving through routine. Serving customers. Cleaning down. Closing things out the way they should be. The rhythm of ordinary life doing what it always does, asking nothing extraordinary, just consistency.
But underneath all of that, something else has been sitting with me.
Not loudly.
Not in a way that interrupts the moment.
But quietly.
Persistently.
Like something waiting to be acknowledged.
I find myself reflecting on the gift of salvation.
Not as a concept.
Not as something I have heard before.
But as something that has become intensely personal.
Something that, the more I sit with it, the more it unsettles me in the right way.
Because if I am honest, there are moments where I forget how radical it really is.
Not intentionally.
Not consciously.
But slowly.
Quietly.
Like most things that drift, it does not happen all at once.
It happens in small ways.
Subtle ways.
You begin to understand the truth of salvation, but over time, you start to normalize it. You carry it, but you do not always feel the weight of it. You believe it, but you do not always sit in the reality of what it actually means.
And then something pulls you back.
Something forces you to look at it again, not from a distance, but from within.
That is where I find myself this morning.
Coffee in hand.
Mind steady.
But something deeper pressing beneath the surface.
I think about the thief on the cross.
Not as a story I have read before.
But as a moment.
A real moment.
A man hanging beside Christ, at the very end of his life.
No time to correct his past.
No time to prove anything.
No opportunity to build a better version of himself.
No religious performance.
No moral track record worth presenting.
Just a life behind him that, by all accounts, had led him to that point.
Condemned.
Exposed.
At the end.
And yet, in that moment, something shifts.
Not externally.
Internally.
He sees something.
Not perfectly.
Not with full clarity.
But enough.
Enough to recognise who is beside him.
Enough to speak.
Enough to believe.
And he says something that cuts through everything else happening in that moment.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And Jesus responds,
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
That is it.
No process.
No probation.
No requirement to prove himself.
No conditions attached.
Just grace.
Immediate.
Complete.
Undeniable.
And if you sit with that long enough, it does something to you.
Because it removes every illusion of control.
Every idea that we contribute something meaningful to our own salvation.
Every quiet belief that we can earn, maintain, or secure it through our own effort.
And if I am honest, this is where the tension still lives.
Because we all, at times, drift.
Not away from belief.
But into something more subtle.
It doesn’t always announce itself.
It disguises itself as devotion.
As discipline.
As sincerity.
We begin to fill our days with more Christian activity. More structure. More doing. More movement. We convince ourselves that if we just stay busy enough, if we just pray more, serve more, read more, show up more, that somehow we will tip the divine scales in our favour.
As if God is measuring.
As if grace needs assistance.
As if the cross was not enough on its own.
And what I find both deeply confronting and quietly beautiful is this.
The gospel account of the thief on the cross dismantles that entire argument.
Completely.
Under the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, that way of thinking cannot stand.
Because the thief had no time to perform.
No opportunity to build a record.
No space to prove sincerity through action.
He brought nothing.
And yet he was received.
That truth does not just challenge bad theology.
It exposes the instinct in me that still wants to earn what can only be given.
It brings everything back to the same place.
Grace.
Because the thief had nothing to offer.
Nothing to build on.
Nothing to present.
And yet, he was received.
Fully.
Completely.
Not because of what he had done.
But because of who he believed in.
And I cannot escape the weight of that.
Because my own life, in many ways, echoes that reality more than I sometimes admit.
Not in the exact circumstances.
But in the condition.
The need.
The complete absence of anything I could bring to God that would make me worthy of what He gives freely.
And yet, like that thief, I found myself in a moment where everything narrowed.
Where all the noise, all the layers, all the attempts to make sense of life collapsed into something simple.
I needed saving.
Not improving.
Not adjusting.
Not refining.
Saving.
And that is where grace meets you.
Not at your best.
Not when everything is aligned.
But when you realise you cannot carry yourself any further.
That is where the gospel stops being abstract.
That is where it becomes real.
And the truth is this.
We are saved by grace through faith.
Not by effort.
Not by performance.
Not by becoming something worthy first.
It is given.
Freely.
And that is what unsettles me.
Because everything in me wants to contribute.
Everything in me wants to feel like I have done something to deserve it.
But the gospel dismantles that.
Completely.
And this is where it stands, unshaken.
It does not bend to my emotions. It does not weaken under my inconsistency. It does not withdraw itself when I feel unworthy of it. It remains. Steady. Confronting. Alive. The gospel does not ask me to clean myself up before I come. It does not wait for me to reach some imagined level of spiritual stability before it becomes effective. It meets me exactly where I am, but it refuses to leave me there. It speaks into the chaos, into the doubt, into the quiet wrestle that no one else sees, and it declares something that runs against every instinct I have to fix myself first. That Christ has already done what I cannot do. That the weight I carry, the past I cannot undo, the thoughts that still rise in the dark when the world goes quiet, have all been accounted for in a moment I did not witness but now live under. And if I am honest, there is something in me that still resists that kind of grace. Something that wants to earn it, to prove it, to make sense of it through effort. But the gospel dismantles that every time. It brings me back to the same place the thief found himself in. Empty handed. Fully seen. With nothing left to offer but faith. And somehow, that is enough. Not because faith is powerful in itself, but because of the One it rests in. This is not fragile hope. This is not a temporary covering. This is not something that shifts with circumstance. This is final. Complete. Anchored in Christ. And that means that even in my weakest moments, even in the quiet hours where my thoughts begin to press in, even when I feel the tension of who I am versus who I am becoming, I am not standing on unstable ground. I am standing on something that does not move. The gospel is not just the beginning of my faith. It is the ground I stand on now. And it will be the ground I stand on at the end. And that reality does not just change how I see salvation. It changes how I see everything.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 1.7 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
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