I am currently in the middle of two summertime projects: scanning and shredding.
A few months ago I was poking around my home computer when it occurred to me that too many of our family vacation photos were stored on a hard drive instead of in photo albums. I missed the old days of sitting around the table over a lingering breakfast and passing around the albums and telling stories revived by the pictures. Passing the computer around the table just isn’t the same.
And then, when I saw how easy it would be to use Cyndi’s new laptop, a MacBook, to create multiple photo albums for the entire family, I knew I had a worthy project. The last step in this sequence occurred when I was looking through one of our old-fashioned albums filled with analog photos, and I thought: what a shame it would be if fire or flood destroyed all these baby pictures, especially in a modern world when duplication was so easy. And so, my summer scanning project.
I’ve been going album by album, page by page, scanning photos into our home computer. From these, I hope to generate several photo albums to give away when I am finished. What I really hope is to preserve and restore those family stories that would be lost without pictures. And I hope to preserve them in a way that my son and daughter can pass them down to their own families.
It wasn’t that long ago when one of the hardest decision a family had to make after a funeral was how to divide the family photos. Who would be the keeper of the stories? But with technology, that should no longer be a conflict. I want everyone to have them all.
My other summer project is shredding. Cyndi and I hope to buy a new house this next year and thoughts of moving have spawned thoughts of decluttering. I started working on the boxes in our storage unit and the first problems I noticed were three boxes labeled, in my handwriting, and I’m not making this up, “Financial Records,� “Old Financial Records,� and “Really Old Financial Records.� All three boxes were full of records well past the traditional seven years recommended retention, and all contained information that would make a potential identity thief very happy.
So I went to work destroying documents. After I burned up our original entry-level shredder, I bought one of those micro-shredders that converts social-security-number-containing-documents into tiny confetti.
Even my new shredder overheats after I run several handfuls of paper through it, so I’ve been moving back and forth between the scanner and the shredder, preserving memories on one side of the room, destroying old records on the other side.
One evening last week I was shredding and scanning while Cyndi and I discussed some podcasts we’d listened to about marriage; specifically, about how love covers all wrongs. When we love someone, when we want to stay in love with someone, when we care more about them than we care about ourselves, we have to make important choices about which memories and stories to keep and which to discard.
There are some stories that we should never forget, stories that speak to the heart, stories that remind us how we found each other and why we fell in love, stories about how we’ve continued to learn each other, stories of courage and compassion and creativity and pride and longing and teamwork. Those stores should be retold often, scanned into the permanent hard drive of our brain and our heart.
There are other stories, however, that should be put to bed, tossed away, left on the ice to die, or shredded into confetti. We often hold on to old stories of hurt feelings and insult and forgetfulness for years and years, but I Corinthians 13 reminds us that love “keeps no record of wrongs�.
Love covers wrongs. Love shreds wrongs. Love covers old wounds as an act of the will, shredding those stories, never speaking them again. Not out of avoidance, but out of love.
Of course we have to talk to each other about hurts and disappointments, and work through those issues to forgive and heal. That isn’t what I’m writing about. I’m talking about the stories we keep in a holster, ready to quick-draw whenever we need a weapon to use against each other. Those need to be shredded in the name of love.
I recently put away an old story that too often came between Cyndi and me. It was a 30-year-old story, and in fact, since I never spoke it aloud, Cyndi wasn’t even aware it was a problem. Last September I finally shredded it.
So maybe my summer project of scanning and shredding will turn into a lifetime project. Not a bad idea.
