But the line of us is beautifully consistent.
Last night’s texts: one exclaiming over a beautiful home on a holiday tour; one showing a beautiful winter container holding the line between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Both prompting a return early this morning to previous holidays through my phone’s photo library.
Our photos tell the stories of what we love, create and do. They show the seasons, timeouts and turnouts of our lives. They watch us age. They watch us stay the same.
Like product placements in a TV show, the things we love and love doing — the people we love and lose — show up in all of them across decades. It’s important, I think, to consider that we don’t lose ourselves by going back to look; we find ourselves again.
We can age and lose an inch of height and shrink inside our frame, but revisiting the long line of our lives makes us taller and fuller. I look back at my own beautiful containers of spilling flowers; now I don’t even have a balcony to spill dirt. But, living in a small space for a minute, I have the time to be a balcony person who helps water five — going on six — little blooms.
What the photos don’t always capture are the hard minutes we’d like to forget. That’s sad. When we walk into a home filled with things we love, shaped by a hand that moves over the holidays like ours might, we are affirmed. It’s like looking in a mirror. When we experience great loss of any nature, and someone shares that they have experienced the same, our relief is like finding home. Material. Financial. Health. Family. Child. Home. Tragedy or just terribly dark rain cloud, we need hands that move over our particular grief.
I love the photo I took somewhere during some season of a long line of days. We are not the thing or event or happening of the moment. We are the miles and places of our lifetime and in his providence, God gives us reasons to be grateful for them all.
