This past year I made the goal to get the photos of my life and the life of my family all organized and saved digitally. I want to be able to give my adult kids the visual comprehensive record of their lives growing up and bits of their parents and grandparents. This has also created more space in a physical sense. There were boxes of photos. Some are in digital photo albums but a lot of them were just sitting there as a back up. For anyone who was born in the digital photo age, this goal will probably not make much sense or even resonate with the seeming elephant-sized project that it has been.
But as a 54 year old woman who use to wait at least a week for her camera film to be developed, I had my work cut out for me. I needed to make sure all the pictures from the pre-digital age were scanned and put in some sort of sequential order. I have some photos from my grandparents from the 1920’s, then later the 1940’s and 50’s from my husband’s parent and my parents, and then I have those from our childhoods, college years, young married years and the start of our family. We had 10 years of photos from just our own family of 5 before the world changed into a digital one.
I’ve seen lots of “moments” and memories this last year in the span of a century. It has made me pause and reflect on so many things about life.
One of those things jumped out at me this week as I was scanning some pictures and documents from my school years. My mom kept a little book that had a pocket for memorabilia from each grade, K-12. The photos are fun, some of the awkward tween years seem to be missing though. Hmm.
I was mindlessly electronically scanning things from each pocket as has become the norm over this project. Scan it, save it, recycle or toss and ahh….feel the simplicity of less stuff. After scanning what felt like the hundredth progress report, I started to read them. “Do I really need this paper that says my spelling was outstanding?” “How often am I going to need to know if I had a comprehensive understanding of social studies in the 6th grade?”
It is fun to see positive comments from teachers or to see the successes of my childhood. But the comments I really gravitated toward were the ones that said something about what kind of person I was as a young girl. I was shy, afraid, learning to stand up for myself, a good friend, a hard worker, too hard on myself….
These little snippets touched on the bigger picture of who I was and who I was becoming. But they were just a fleeting glance really. There was quite a bit of angst behind the scenes of my childhood and in me. With the progress report in Kindergarten was also a photo of me painting at an easel….still my happy place. I am so happy to have that photo. I will save a few of the scanned comments from teachers and maybe some report cards, mostly to bring a laugh.
But really, who cares what kind of grades or marks I got then? I don’t. That is not what I want to honor about myself or for others to see. I want to understand that little girl at the easel. I want to see her journey, to see where the bumps in the road made her stronger. And to see the bumps that created problem areas that still exist.
Why? Because those things will ultimately tell the story of the One who created her, saw her, and never left her. He is the One that still walks with her today. He isn’t interested in the report cards but delights in the very heart of the girl.
I want to make sure I’m honoring and saving the important things about others as well. I want to see the heart of those around me, not their successes or failures, certainly not their report cards. We are so much more than that.
I don’t want to save or have physical or mental space taken up with the meaningless fluff of this life.
I want to honor the moments and the people of the journey written by the Author. He is the One who deserves all the honor. And that takes up just the perfect amount of space.