Great reminder of why I love scrapbooking...

So today was another day spent as "Grandma Lyn" at Gwen's house.  I am so blessed by these special Monday time off days.  I get to cuddle that new sweetie Anna and I get to see and spend time with Lia, Ellie and Zeke.  Oh how I love these kids!  Today, while Zeke did NOT nap, Ellie and I (and Anna, who was sleeping in my arms) looked at scrapbooks.  This makes my heart happy and blesses me on some many levels.  Ellie loves to look at her mom's completed scrapbooks.   She goes through them page by page and recounts who is in each picture.  Today almost everyone was Ellie (whether it was or not!).  But I was seeing the importance of these albums that take hours and hours to complete.   Such powerful memories.

I was thinking back to a time when Gwen spent hours and hours looking at our photo albums.   They were always kept on a low shelf so that the kids could reach them.  They were looked at over and over and over.   And these scrapbooks are so much better than just a magnetic photo album.   There are words that will someday be just as important as the photos.  For me, the journaling part of scrapbooking is sometimes the hardest thing.  Yet I know that it is so important to make sure that in the future, anyone who looks at these albums will know exactly WHO is in the pictures and WHERE they were taken as well as WHEN.  Just this weekend I pulled out a very old leather photo album that is falling apart.  There are pages and pages crammed full of black and white photos.  Some are very old - from the early 1900's.  The bad news is that there is no one alive who knows who the people are in these photos.  There are no names and we have no idea where these photos were taken.  All I know about this album is that it belonged to Ken's great grandmother Kelly.  I received this album from Ken's mom about a year before she died.  She couldn't identify any of the people either.  And now we are one more generation away from anyone who could bring meaning to these pictures.   I spent a couple of minutes looking at that album.  I turned the pages carefully and ran my fingers over the pictures.  There were babies and cute little boys and girls and young couples.  There were some family pictures including one family with a little boy that was disabled (he had braces on his legs and a cane is in the pictures).  I sure wish I had the key to these photos and the place these people have in our family tree. 

So, with this in mind, I will press on with my scrapbooking.  Not only do I get great enjoyment from this activity, but I am blessed knowing that, if in the future someone finds these books, they will know exactly who we are.  I am glad that I have these two reminders today.  The old photo album and the little almost 5 year old Ellie who loves to look at these scrapbooks.  Both are an inspiration to me.

Jesus, thank you for family and photos and memories.  Holy Spirit, thank you for connecting me to past generations and helping me to see the future through Ellie.   Jesus help us all to see and understand better the connections we have in our generations.   Thank you for bringing more revelation with each day.  Thank you for grandchildren and smiles and hugs.  And thank you for days off from work.  Amen