The Camera

My home growing up in Grenada, MS was a two story red brick house. The house had three bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, dining room and a single bathroom. All of them were downstairs. Upstairs, the house had never been completed. Consequently, it became a huge attic where all sorts of things found their resting place. As a kid, I loved going up into the attic. It was easy as there was an enclosed stairway that went straight up to it. Up in the attic there were canning jars, my dad’s wool army uniform, a couple of boxes of broken toys and piles of magazines. A drum set that I had received one year found its way into the attic, I suspect rather quickly. Over to one side there were wreaths of plastic flowers that hung loosely on their Styrofoam forms, memories of an infant little sister who died just days after birth. An old black and white television took up one corner. Dad hated throwing things away.

One of my favorite trophies in the attic was an old Kodak box camera. No one thought much about the camera. It had been in the attic forever and was in the box with the broken toys. The camera intrigued me. It was nothing like my Polaroid Swinger so it was hard for me to imagine how it worked. Often times I would gaze through the scratched square lens and imagine. Surely it had been on safari, had captured wild animals and amazing moments in history. I would snap the shutter and wait on it to spit out a picture like my Swinger did. Nothing ever happened.

High school and college came and went. Seminary took me off to the far country, Texas, and thoughts about the attic and its treasures faded. Mom died. Jana and I met and were married. Life continued. While home for a visit with my dad, the old attic called my name so up the stairs I went. Nothing much had changed. The old newspaper with JFK’s assassination sat right where it had been since 1963. There were a few more magazines. Some tattered quilts had also ascended the stairs. Over in the old cardboard box of broken toys was the camera. I picked it up and stared through the scratched lens. The thought occurred to me, “What if there were pictures inside.” Impossible. 30 years of Mississippi summer heat and the cold of winter would have ruined them. I found the latch and gently opened the old camera. You guessed it. Inside was a roll of film. As if I had found the arc of the covenant, I carried the film back to a lab in Fort Worth. Three days later there were treasures of immense value. Photographs. Six of them actually. There was a slender young woman on the steps of our house laughing at a really short little boy playing in the snow. Mom and me! Snapshots of a blink in time that was long since gone. Lost moments now remembered. Captured, kept, and now treasured.

God remembers, too. It is mentioned over 70 times that God remembers his people. No cameras required! Our Jewish friends have something called the Yizkor prayer. It is a prayer offered for those who have departed. Rabbi Tielson says this of Yizkor, “Yizkor is a Hebrew word that means "He will remember." Our memory is most fleeting, it is a blink of the eye. Our memory is short and fuzzy and so very partial. "He will remember" means "God will remember." God is beyond the realm of time, not bound by the clock or the calendar. God is beyond the realm of forgetfulness, for God remembers.”

God remembers . . . us. God loves us. God keeps us. God treasures us. Like a mother treasures her child, on a snowy day in Mississippi.