Our stories

We have a wonderful class at Oak Lawn United Methodist Church called Search Warrant. Search Warrant is taught by the incredible Rev. Patsy Brundige. Search Warrant is about the write way to celebrate life. This past Monday Patsy brought in an old suitcase that had duck tape around it because the locks had been broken (I am assuming due to age). Patsy shared that she had been cleaning out her garage and found this old suitcase that had been her mother's. Patsy opened the suitcase with much suspense and revealed the many pictures that were inside. Patsy had no idea who was in any of the pictures. She thought that some were of her uncle who had died of influenza at an early age, but the pictures had no names on the back, no dates, no stories. Those faces just stared out at us. They had no stories to share.

Patsy was trying to bring home the importance of recording our stories, she said that if she had opened up the suitcase to find reams of paper filled with stories about the people in the photos, then the people in the photos would have come alive. Instead, she only had unknown faces.

I thought of helping my mom clean out her house on Galveston Bay. I remember a huge table filled with photographs. If the photograph had people in it that we knew, we kept it. If it was a scenic photo, we threw it away. The people were what was important for us, but we have to tell their stories, tell who they were, and how they impacted our lives or else they will just be unknown faces.

And that made me think of Christmas letters. Every year my mom has produced a Christmas letter and a few years ago she had them all bound. "An Anthology of Christmas Greetings from 1980-2005." 25 years of Christmas letters. That is something that I treasure, and one of the reasons why I love to write a Christmas letter.

Anyway, I have been thinking about our stories and how we can write them down and share them. The write way to celebrate life...