There’s a wooden chest in my room that I inherited from my grandmother. I sanded it down and refinished it back to it’s original beauty. I love this chest because every time I look at it I feel a connection, not only to her, but to the past… my past and the past of my entire family for generations. When I see this chest, I see a piece of my heritage and a sense of nostalgia to my familial roots.

Because the chest causes such an air of reminiscence, it is no surprise that I filled it with all the family photographs that I could find: recent pictures that I can readily identify, really old pictures that I have accumulated from family members over the years (some of relatives that I have never even met), vacations photos, baby pictures, weddings, graduations, and all the pictures in between. Every picture in that chest has a story and a memory behind it. Some of the stories are mine. Some have been told to me. And some I have had to wonder about because the story is a mystery.

I have had the chest for almost a decade, so I honestly don’t remember where I put the pictures before, but I love having a central place where everyone knows the pictures will be. My family never has to wonder where to look for their photographic memories because they know that somewhere deep in that chest are the physical pictures that I… or someone else… has had printed out over the years. 

The problem with this chest is that it became too vast. As time marched on, and more photos were added, it became a deep well of chaos. Random pictures were everywhere and finding the specific picture of the specific person of the specific memory became an increasingly insurmountable chore. There was no order to the pictures. They were tossed into the void and then if you wanted to find it, you had to go through all the stacks and stacks of photographs until you found the right one. (This is less of a problem now, of course, due to the rise of digital photography.)

Eventually, I broke down and went through and organized the photos into storage bags for each person in the family so at least I could narrow down my search when I needed to locate a specific photograph. But still these mounds of pictures didn’t tell an actual story… well, not the story they were supposed to tell. In the chest, they told a story of a family that was in a hurry to make memories, snap a shot, and then hope that they would remember the memory later… or that it would come back to them when they happened to see the picture. But that doesn’t help others to know what happened in the photo. 

After years and years of accumulation, I began to hang out with some friends who re-introduced me to the joy of scrapbooking! It had been ages since I had taken the time to put photos in an album, much less scrapbook them. In an era of Facebook and Instagram, the art of physically cataloging memories has almost become extinct. There is a whole generation of people who have no idea what it is like to take a picture… but not know what it actually looks like until you take it to the store to be…. DEVELOPED… (insert gasp here.) And while I love a good vacation social media post… full of instant memories for the world to see… it’s not the same thing as pulling a scrapbook album off the bookshelf and remembering that same vacation in the quiet stillness of your living room and having the physical touch of the photos in your hand.

With scrapbooking, you can take these photographic memories and make the story as elaborate as you want. There’s no limit to the imagination you can put on the pages. You can express yourself freely without having to worry about a sarcastic comment from someone you haven’t seen since high school. You get to write the story exactly as you want it to be and you can put an added layer of beauty on the page that wasn’t there before. The blank page you start with comes to life before you as you add different colored paper, stickers, words, embellishments, trim, ribbon, and of course… just the right amount of pictures to create a unique masterpiece to tell the tale of that moment in history that you want to preserve forever.

The downside to scrapbooking pages of your life is that it is time consuming. It takes minutes to post your vacation memory online, but it can take weeks to months to put a scrapbook together. Even adding pictures to a basic photo album is quicker than scrapbooking them. Another downside is that you have to be selective with the pictures you use. It is not cost or time effective to scrapbook every picture. The amount of time and resources needed to create even one page necessitates that you choose your memories carefully. You want to tell the memory in a way that will captivate, not annoy… and you want to be succinct enough to show what you want to be seen publicly, but that will also trigger you to remember the part you want to keep in the private recesses of your mind about that moment. Not every bit of each moment needs to be told out loud and scrapbooking reminds you of this while you are working intently on the pages. 

Scrapbooking is also more personal than social media. Anyone can see your social media post… people who haven’t spoken to you in years will know whatever details you put on your page. However, to show your scrapbooked memory, the person would need to be more intimate in your life… at the very least you would have to have an interpersonal relationship for them to even see the finished product.  

We are the keepers of the memories of our lives. We start as a blank page and we add to that page as time goes on. We fill the chest of our mind with the memories we store there. We have been given the grace and freedom to share our memories and write our stories how we see fit. Circumstances determine part of how these memories are made, but we get to choose how those stories are written and told. We choose how past hurts, joys, successes, failures, situations, and relationships are remembered. We can toss them in a chest and hope that someone will sort out what they think they mean. We can post them on social media for the world to see and form an opinion on. We can put them in a storage bag to compartmentalize them. We can put them in a photo album, with a plastic sense of meaning. Or we can scrapbook them in elaborate detail showing the cherished parts to a selected few and keeping the private parts to ourselves. There is no wrong answer for how you tell your story… and not every part of your story needs to be told the same way. I have many pictures that are fine to be shared on social media because they matter at the moment, but they are not so deeply rooted in my life that I need to invest a significant amount of my time and resources to recall them later. In my closet and on my book shelves are multiple photo albums from times gone by, that will stay there because someone before me took the time to put them in the plastic holders and hand them down. I still have bags of pictures in my grandmother’s chest that I will never throw away… nor will I scrapbook them because they are precious enough for me to look at from time to time, but don’t need to be elaborately remembered. (I also have pictures just flying free in that chest because I have not been able to take the time to put them in the storage bag they belong to, but that’s a whole different blog post.)

I love all of the pictures that I have in my possession because they remind of where I’ve come from… where I’ve been… and what I’ve been through. But my cherished stories and memories will be scrapbooked. These are the moments that have shaped me. The moments I want others to see long after I’m gone. The memories that I want others to know stood out in my life and made a difference. I want them to be looked at longer than my social media posts. I want them to be revered more than the bags of pictures in the chest. I want there to be more details on these pages than a photo album could provide. I want anyone who is close enough to see my scrapbooks to be aware that these moments are the important points in my story.

You have a story to tell, too. Memories to be “scrapbooked”. You have moments in your life that have defined you… paved your way… made you who you are. But some of these memories are not fond. Some of these moments were hard and they are difficult to try and remember because of the pain they caused. It is because of these trying times that you don’t like to tell your story. Maybe there’s shame… or guilt… or embarrassing moments that you don’t want to recall… so you don’t. 

But here’s the thing… all of your past memories and experiences shaped you… ALL OF THEM. They all matter, but they don’t all have to be told. You get to choose how your memories are relayed… which ones stay in the chest, which ones get the plastic (superficial) story, which ones go on social media (the public side), and which ones you scrapbook for the next generation. 

Remember to tell your story and share your memories… because it matters…. because you matter… because you are the keeper of your memories… and one day that is all your family and friends will have of you.

“Let this be written for a future generation, that a people not yet created may praise the Lord” Psalms 102:18