This week I was going through some old photo albums. There were photos of me, my brother, and my sister as children. Pictures of my grandparents in the prime of their lives. A photo of my mom and dad sitting on a couch as two young teens that were dating. It’s funny the things that catch my attention now.
When I was younger, I noticed the big moments … the birthdays and vacations. But now, I find myself staring at the ordinary moments. Someone is laughing over the kitchen table that I remember sitting at for countless meals. Seeing that cluttered kitchen in the background, because no one thought to clean it up before snapping the photo. I find myself pausing on those photos that wouldn’t have meant too much to me twenty years ago. The ones that aren’t posed. No one is even looking at the camera. People are talking in the background. Someone is washing the car. There was another photo of my grandfather laying on the grass exhausted from work. Though they weren’t in the photo, I can picture his work boots. I can almost smell his sweat. At the time this was PaPa taking a break, but today it feels like a picture of a man that loved his family enough to wear himself out for them. Nothing about these photos stands out. There is no moment or action that is trying to be memorable. It is just snapshots of a life from a long time ago.
The older I get the more I’m convinced that the moments we treasure most rarely announce themselves. They arrive looking like every other day. It’s just another day. We assume there will be another dinner around that table, another conversation, another basic day with the people we love.
Most of the time we don’t even know what we’re holding until we’re holding a photograph instead.
I wonder why we’re like that? Why is it so hard to recognize a moment while we’re living in it? I’m not talking about the obvious milestones. We all know weddings matter, and graduations matter. We fully document the birth of a new child entering the world. These times are locked in and unforgettable.
What I’m talking about are the vanilla days. Those days that don’t seem important enough to remember. It’s just another day. I don’t know if you’re like me, but I’m often surprised at the random memories that find their way back to me. A conversation I haven’t though about in years. Or, riding shotgun in the truck with my PaPa. Or, playing catch in the backyard. All of these basic random days. At the time, I wasn’t thinking, “I’ll remember this someday.” Nope … it was just another day. I obviously don’t remember everything. None of us do. So why these moments? Why are these the ones that have made their way back to me? What is it about an ordinary Monday night that quietly settled somewhere deep inside of me. That thought that comes back years later as thought it had never left.
The photos I saw this week that moved me weren’t the spectacular ones, they were the basic ones. The kitchen table, the backyard, the family pet, the living room with that big old TV. At the time I was likely wanting to rush through them because they felt so normal, so boring. But, now, they are cherished memories that I’d give almost anything to experience again.
Why? Not because it was a fun moment. Not because there was excitement in the air. These days were as routine as it gets. So why would I give anything to go back there? Because what felt so ordinary then was quietly wrapped in love.
I wonder if familiarity has something to do with this. Maybe we become so accustomed to the people we love that we slowly stop noticing the gift that they really are. We stop being amazed by what once caused wonder. And then life changes … a chair is now empty, the phone stops ringing, the house gets quieter. Suddenly that ordinary Monday night doesn’t seem so ordinary anymore.
We don’t lose our appreciation for the important things because they become less important. We lose it because they become too familiar.
Maybe this is true in more areas than we care to admit. Could it be that familiarity slips into every area of our lives? The people we love, that home that we prayed for. Our health that we don’t think about until it’s interrupted. All of these ordinary gifts become so woven into our everyday life that we stop seeing them as gifts at all.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this isn’t just something we do with old photographs. It’s something we do with life. The things that once took our breath away slowly become part of the background of our life. Not because they are less beautiful, but because they’ve become too familiar.
Our relationship with God isn’t immune either. I think this is why the Bible consistently reminds us to “remember”. The nation of Israel was repeatedly instructed to remember the covenant, to set up altars as reminders. Jesus told us to remember Him with the Lords supper. Interestingly, the Bible usually doesn’t treat forgetting as an intellectual problem. Rather, it’s a relational problem. Maybe this is why God keeps asking His people to remember. He’s not afraid we’ll lose the information, He’s protecting us from something much more dangerous … familiarity.
We don’t wake up one morning and intend to love God less, we simply stop noticing the wonder and awe of being loved by Him. It reminds me of Jesus’s words to the church at Ephesus.
Revelation 2:4-5
“But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place – unless you repent.”
I find it interesting that before Jesus tells the church to repent, He tells them to remember. That’s likely not the order I would have chosen. Jesus understood something about the human heart that we often forget. Sometimes what we need isn’t another reminder of what we’re doing wrong. We need a reminder of what it felt like when our hearts were captured by Him in the first place.
Love has a way of growing familiar if we’re not careful. It’s not less real, just less noticed. Maybe remembering isn’t about living in yesterday. Maybe it’s God’s way of helping us see today’s gifts with yesterday’s gratitude.
As I closed those photo albums this week I was all in my emotions. But, I had a new and different appreciation. These weren’t just old pictures, they were reminders. They reminded me that some of the greatest joys in life don’t arrive with trumpets blasting and huge fanfare. Often, they show up while riding shotgun in the pickup truck. They show up on a normal Monday night at the dinner table. And, maybe that’s true of God’s presence as well. Maybe today isn’t quite as ordinary as it feels. Maybe years from now I’ll look back and see how much grace was sitting in front of me all along.