5 Minute Friday: Remember

Spring has sprung...kind of...ok, so we're still waiting around these parts for a bit more springiness to get added to our Spring, but in the meantime it is FRIDAY! Yes, Friday! Around here that means a little bit of free writing. We write and whether or not it is right we take a deep breath and press "Publish" at the end. Who are "we"? We're a band of misfit writers led by Lisa-Jo who link-up to share our 5 minutes of writing madness every Friday.

Topic: Remember
GO!

There are dozens of boxes filled with more than a dozen lifetimes of photos sitting in my living room right now. After years of avoidance my Grandmother packed up her housekeeping and shipped all these bits of life to me. They are the remnants of lives well lived and lives lived selfishly and in the end don't we want more than old dried out photos to remain? 

The chronicling of lives in dusty albums, our great need to hang onto memories when life slips so quickly out of our hands and into the wheel of eternity. Usually people don't get the honor of being the caretaker of such volumes of life until they are much older, but I'm just shy of thirty and I've been asked to steward this heritage of images.

I flip through the pages and note a cousin who was a black sheep. I didn't know him well. He was much older, but the lines on his face make me think he never believed that he was loved. He never believed that he was known, seen, and still loved by anyone. He never knew that God could love so very much. I stare at a picture of him as a boy and I wonder, why don't we grow up believing what is true and good? Can anything, anyone not be redeemed? Some of us really don't believe that we can. I don't think he ever believed that God could undo all the ugly. That the picture of the smooth skinned boy that he was could be the same as the etched deep lines of a haggard old man's soul.

While I'm tucking wee girl heart and hands in for bed I lean over and whisper words that I hope tuck themselves deep in her heart. More than Mimi and Poppi, more than all your aunts, uncles and cousins, yes, more than even Mama and Daddy, God loves you. He loves you so much that He sent Jesus for you, to rescue you. You've got a dark heart, but He sent Jesus so it could be made light, bright, better than new. Jesus joys in making hearts new and redeeming all that we thought lost. Remember that. Always remember that.


STOP!