The Gift that Remains

I was awakened at 3:00 a.m. by my dog, barking to be taken out. It was brisk out there, so I was awake for awhile after. In the short intervening time that I did go back to sleep, I had a nightmare. I am not an organized person. I put things off, even things that mean a lot to me. I used to scrapbook quite avidly. I am so many years behind that I have hundreds of photos on walmart.com waiting to be printed. Probably thousands, when you come right down to it. My husband has custody of the family videos. I don't even know what we do have, in that department. I know we never seem to use the video camera. I have only a select few photos on backup in our safe deposit box. I really need to get organized. In my nightmare one of the kids had gone through my plastic box of cds with snapshots on them and had used seven of them for his own purposes, recording over the photos. I awoke with a start. I guess my anxiety over my slipshod memory-keeping, an endeavor that was so important to me when the kids were really small and which has lost some of its urgency to me now that the kids have become a camera-shy preteen and teen and I have cycled through a million hobbies other than scrapbooking, had finally come home to roost.

I got up, brewed the coffee and resolved (for the one-millionth time) that I will make sense of the pictures, SD cards and videos that I do have, and do things differently going forward. We still have a lot of years left to be a family, and to make memories. I felt calmer than I did a couple of hours prior in the inky blackness of my bedroom.

Now that I am sitting here with a steaming cup of coffee in my Yosemite mug, the one that brings back memories of a trip I really enjoyed, I am reminded again that, though Satan may torment us over fear of loss, God wants me to know that the most important thing I will ever possess or experience is my on-going relationship with my heavenly Father through Christ Jesus. Thankfully, it can never be taken away from me.