The Past: Ponder, Preserve, Purge

Forgive my alliteration, but those are the words that have been floating around in my head.  Zach and I have been trying to finish up our basement project lately.  The painting is done so we've turned to organizing the stuff that will ultimately go in the painted rooms as well as the stuff that is stored in the basement.  Stuff that for many years was stored in our parents' houses but is now here with us.  In my case, my mom brought several boxes four years ago when we moved in to this house.  I sorted through it and got rid of quite a bit at the time but I thought it was worth another look now.

So last night we put the kids to bed and headed downstairs to tackle some boxes. One box that at first glance appeared to contain only K-12 yearbooks actually included a large pile of miscellaneous artifacts from high school through college: "yearbooks" from camps, TCU Symphony programs, newspaper clippings and my ticket stub from the 1998 Sun Bowl, to name a few.  (Proof that my parents were cooler than I realized at the time: they let my 18 year old self and four friends drive all the way across Texas by ourselves to go to that game, where we dressed up in purple togas and saw our Frogs defeat USC.)  Another box contained all the journals that I kept from about 6th grade until mid-college.  It's quite a pile; I don't think I was a very profound writer but I was certainly prolific.  That box also contained a large quantity of correspondence: letters, cards, postcards from friends and family, mostly from high school and the first few years of college.  It was surprising to see how many actual letters my college friends and I wrote each other during the summer.  We all had email addresses (one had to for school) but the use of pen and paper had not entirely died out.  Hard to imagine any of the college students I know now writing a letter to a friend over the summer.

Looking at all this stuff, as you can imagine, unleashed a flood of memories, good, bad, and indifferent.  There were some letters from friends I met in college, dear sisters in Christ, who showed me how vibrant life in Christ could be, and I was prompted to give thanks to God for putting them in my life.  There were birthday letters from my Grandpa Jones that I am sure I didn't fully appreciate at the time I received them, but he's been gone for nearly ten years now and I'm moved by the little things he thought I'd enjoy.  There was a card from my mom that must have accompanied a finals week care package; she said she knew she was being a bad influence on me but it was hard to send carrots through the mail.  I think I remember that care package; I'm pretty sure there was a generous quantity of Oreos. :-)

But there were also things from my past that didn't bring smiles to my face.  Seeing the things that my teenage self thought important to save, I realized how much I lived for the approval of others.  Like the books from camps.  Our church camps usually ended with yearbook-signing-type events.  (I'm pretty sure we called them something other than yearbooks but I can't remember what.  Any help, Megan?)  I remember reading and re-reading the comments from people whose approval I craved, especially if they were male.  I guess it made me feel better about myself but from this side of high school I see the discontent and small view of God behind my actions.  I can't look back with regret; a sovereign God directed the path that brought me to where I am now, but how thankful I am that God has "[made] known to me the path of life; in [His] presence is fullness of joy" (from Psalm 16). That kind of stuff was easy to get rid of.

All my journals, though...I didn't even touch them last night.  I predict that if I were to read them now, about 90% would be painful recollections of high school crushes and putting my hope in the wrong things.  While I doubt there is much I would actually want to keep secret, I think there is little that would edify a future reader like my daughter.  I hope and pray that Jesus is Esther's first love from a young age and that she will be thereby spared much of what I thought and felt as I sought the approval of man.  But the other 10% of those journals might hold memories worth keeping, like what the first days of high school and college were like.  So someday (soon?) I will go through them and extract the good, and as for the rest...anyone want to come over and make smores over a nice little fire?