insignificant

When I was younger, I always enjoyed going to historical homes.  Technically, these are a type of museum, but I hesitate to use the term "museum," because I don't particularly like museums in general.  However, I was always entranced by historical homes and farm museums, where a dreamy young girl could walk through and imagine the lives of people from the past.

Some historical homes are period homes, while others are the homes of famous people, whose personal artifacts are on display.  When my own children were younger, one winter during the infamous New York February Break, we traveled to the Poughkeepsie area to see FDR's childhood home, Eleanor Roosevelt's home (where she lived when she and FDR were not on amicable terms), and the Vanderbilt Mansion at Hyde Park, NY.  This was an interesting and memorable trip.

At FDR's home, we perused a myriad of exhibits, including glass cases full of his childhood toys, and boyhood letters he had written in pencil, which were carefully curated, laid out in displays so we could read them and see what a young prodigy he had always been.

I mention this because I am going through boxes of memorabilia in my basement, old notebooks where, as a child, I had painstakingly scrawled the beginnings of story after story, projects our children did for school, awards, newspaper clippings, adjudication forms from music auditions, homemade birthday cards, copies of a magazine that published one of my early stories as a contest winner, a seemingly infinite collection of things that all feel unbearably special if I sit down and start to ponder them.

In my mind, the thought hovers (I think, though I am ashamed to confess) that if one of us becomes famous someday, all these things will matter.  But I am fixing to move back east, across the United States of America, in a truck that we will rent and pack and drive unprofessionally at our own personal cost.  The boxes of salvaged memories will have to be discarded, once and for all.  I am not and will never be FDR, and when I think about it that way, I am not much more surprised by the fact than anyone else would be.  Nobody cares about this stuff except me, and honestly, I have other, more important places to apply my mind and energy.

All I really need is a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom, a place for a visiting friend to sleep, my Bible, and a few books.  A comfortable reading chair.  A few clothes, dishes, pots and pans, blankets and sheets.  That is honestly all I need.  I need to live and shine for Jesus.  Musty boxes weighed down with past memories do not contribute to a productive life.

We should have an event and call it, "Bonfire of the Basement."  We should burn away all the things that make us feel wistful, or awkward, or prideful, or bitter, just burn them up in the back corner of the back yard and watch the smoke drift away into the night sky.

When Shawn and I went to the Michael Card conference in 2017, Michael Card taught us through the Gospel of Luke.  At one point, he shared about how he had taught a class once on all the gospels, and he had a mathematic, engineering sort of woman in the class, so he gave her an assignment.  He told her to go through the gospels and add up how much time they covered from Jesus' life on earth.  So, she read through the gospels, and made notes on each event from Jesus' life that they recorded, estimating how long each event lasted.  She compared and deleted duplicate events.  I do not remember the amount of time that she ended up with, but she did the math and divided it out, and it came to some incredibly small percentage of Jesus life, like 0.0005%, or something like that.  I think the total was less than a week, when she added it all up.  Michael Card said, "It's like if Jesus' life was $100, we got five cents, one nickel." (**)

This is mind-blowing if you think about a David McCullough biography.  People have written chapter upon chapter upon chapter about each other in tomes that pile up in libraries around the world.  Yet, after the God of the Universe sent His only begotten Son into the world, the record that remains of His time here consists of four short books, narrating a strategically tiny part of His life.  28 chapters in Matthew, 16 in Mark, 24 in Luke, 21 in John, and that is all there is.  It's perfect, and it's enough; it tells us exactly what we need to know.  It is short, succinct.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all we needed from the life of Christ--the very life of God incarnate, Himself--then I certainly have too much memorabilia in my current possession.




** I may be off on exact numbers here, as I am going from memory, and my memory is often faulty.  But the point I am making is true and valid.