A Box Full of Memories

As my parents gear up to move to North Carolina within the next month or so, I reluctantly took a couple of boxes back to my dorm room at the Academy to sort through.  I had a vague idea that this box of past treasures would unleash some distant memories about people, places and things. 

And so I lifted the lid of the first box and my eyes fell on boring textbooks from my college days.  Kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?   

So I pulled out a thick book entitled Microcomputing.  I remember taking the college course one semester only to find out the next semester they bought brand new computers and changed the entire course.  The next book was a very large algebra book.  I decided not to page through it and quickly set it aside.  Math and I respect each other.  I use it when I must but confess that I do not go in search of math problems for fun!

Then I came across something a little more exciting: a little shopping bag with several ‘folders’ of pictures in them.  I eagerly opened the first folder, wondering what pictures hid within.  As I viewed the pictures, memories began to flash through my mind of a D.C. trip with my youth group, a LIFE conference out in Colorado Springs with certain members of my youth group, pictures of my brother when he was very small (hard to believe he is married now and has a child!), some concert and pictures of clouds from an airplane (its not often you see the top of clouds and a world below from an airplane) and rainbows at various times.  My mind easily recalled most of the names of the people in my youth group and I began to wonder what happened to each of them. 

Where are they now?  Are they still following the Lord after twenty years?  Are they married?  Do they have families of their own?  Questions.  Ponderings.  Memories.

I set the pictures down and rummaged through the old gems again.  This time I pulled out a stack of statistics of when I played football, jr. high basketball and ran track.  Certificates, a handful of ribbons of various colors, copies of newspaper articles and pins to decorate some coat were stuffed near the bottom of this box—long forgotten by their owner.  Memories of certain games flooded my mind—our first jr. high basketball game where we lost 58 to 8 or my jr. high football games where we won all our games except the last, which we tied.   

Then I pulled out a peculiar treasure: a deck of ‘snake cards.’  Yup, I liked those slithering reptiles when I was growing up.  For some reason they always fascinated me though I could not tell you why.  I always wanted a pet snake but my mom always said, “You’ll have to keep it outside.” 

“Why?” I typically answered. 

“What if it escapes?” She typically answered.

So I never really had a pet snake.  I caught them occasionally, kept them for a day or so and then would let them go. 

Then came a stack of various magazines: some from my denomination, some religious ones and a couple of teenage magazines geared for the ‘average teenager’ (this was before cell phones, twitter, facebook and the internet—yeah, I know, I lived in the ‘stone age’ back then!)  I paged through one of the teenage magazines and came across an article entitled, ‘The Boredom Zone.’  Next to it was a little quote that read: “Most boring Sermon: In 1977, Rev. Tony Leyva preached to his congregation in West Palm Beach—for 72 hours.”  That’s a very long time to listen to a sermon, much less preach one!

Well, one way to combat boredom is to find a treasure chest (an old box in your attic or basement) from the past and rummage through it.  Let the items in those box trigger memories. If you have children, share the memories with them.  It might be a great way for you to share a bit of your life with them.