Memory Album

Brenda and I made our first home in Scottsdale, Arizona. We attended a church where a dozen or more other “young married” couples also attended. We formed a Sunday School class and fellowship group that we called “Jointly Committed” and for several years in the mid-to-late 80’s we joined together in many active, ambitious and exciting events. Mostly we had fun. Brenda and I look back very fondly on those days. We made friends that we still cherish, and we set our lives on a path that we still travel today because of the relationships that we were blessed with in those days.
I’ve connected with some of the members of “Jointly Committed” on Facebook and one of the guys posted a picture album of some of our activities. It was a picture of a Maundy Thursday drama that caught my attention and while looking through the album I was reminded of something I wrote years ago:

My wife and her sister like to make memory books. They’ll take all their pictures with a certain theme, like ‘summer vacation at the beach’ or ‘Christmas Day at Moms’ and mount them all in a book, just like a regular picture album, but then they add their own characteristic brand of humor to their creation. They’ve been known to take broad liberties with their editing techniques. Like inserting clever little thought balloons above people’s heads, or writing silly captions under your pictures, or even creating a cartoon from a series of otherwise very ordinary snapshots.
These two sisters have a lot of fun making and sharing their memory books and we all enjoy looking at the pictures and reliving all the good times that we’ve shared together.
One of my sisters made each of us a framed photo collection for Christmas last year. She got a bunch of old family pictures from my mom and mounted them in the same setting with pictures from our more recent family events.
There’s something that just really stirs my emotions when I look back into these pictures of my parents before they had babies, and of me with my brother and sisters when we were just innocent little kids. And then to see recent pictures of ourselves laughing together knowing the things that we could never have imagined back then.

Wouldn’t that be something if Jesus had a sister who made a memory book for him? Wouldn’t you just love to sit down with your family and take a look at that?
I can just imagine opening to the first page and viewing a photograph of this beautiful, young woman, nine months pregnant, sitting on a little donkey with her handsome young husband, his face turned away from the camera, tugging on the lead rope and walking all the way to Bethlehem. (Can you picture the thought balloon above his head?) Then a page or two later there‘s a curly-headed little Jesus, smiling up at the camera with a front tooth missing, proudly holding up his latest woodworking project. And everybody is wondering what it’s supposed to be.
The wedding at Cana would fill a page in Jesus’ memory book. With pictures of children dancing, old people nodding and smiling in approval and Jesus kissing the bride. On the next page are panoramic landscapes from the day he fed the five thousand. Dramatic clouds on the horizon: the profile of the hills sloping down to the sea. Thousands of people, seated in groups, blanket the ground like a tremendous patch-work quilt.
Right in the middle of the book his sister created this artful montage of candid portraits. A long shot of Jesus, on his knees in prayer, silhouetted against a glorious sunrise, a close-up of the Savior, his head on a pillow, peacefully sleeping in a boat.
Palm Sunday is the last event I imagine seeing in Jesus’ memory book. And these are some good pictures! They are all outdoor shots. It’s springtime. The sun is shining. The disciples are just beaming; they’re the grand marshals of an impromptu parade! Children are waving palm branches and singing. A bright carpet of clothing draws your eye to the subject of each photograph: Jesus Christ, riding on a donkey, as the crowd shouts, “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
As your eye is drawn further into the picture, you realize that Jesus is the only one who is not really smiling. And in your mind you travel back to Palm Sunday and to the events that followed and you realize that the people in that picture, despite their religious fervor, did not grasp the significance of the event, even as they were living it. They never imagined that things would turn out the way they did.

Our oldest child is now nearly as old as I was in my friend’s pictures. I wonder if there are any insignificant moments or events in our lives? Do we spend enough time imagining our future?