Have you ever heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words?”   Recently, my mom had out her albums, sorting through pages and pages of old black and white photos.  Some are more than one hundred years old, and they all tell a story.

It’s not hard, when looking at them, to see the resemblances passed down four and five generations to my own kids, and what will someday be shared with theirs.  The apple, they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree in so many ways.  

The stories the pictures tell are so intriguing. “Oh, Uncle Pete… You know what they said about him, right?”  Or “The sisters, they were always so close… they could make fun out of just being together.”  And “She knew she was dying, and all she could think about was who was going to take care of her little girl…” 

I bet your family has stories like this too.

We’re too close, I think, to our own history to have the perspective of what will be said of us.  I think about this a lot.  Like my mom, I have photo albums also.  What I see when I look at them — of my beautiful babies, of love, of Christmas’s and Thanksgivings and people who are no longer with us — all have a thousand words too.  It seems a bit surreal.  I know I was there, but so much has changed.

I don’t want my kids to look at my pictures and say of me, what my mom says of my great uncle Pete.  And yet, I know there will be things that I get tagged with.  Maybe they will be harmless enough, like “She made an awesome beef stew,” or “My mom was a serial sneezer — if she sneezed once, a dozen more would follow.”

But there will be other things, I’m sure.  Hard things, difficult things. Seasons where we all somehow just survived.  Times when we were adrift, shattered, and not even remotely the people we should have been.  

There were wonderful times, too — lots of them.

I want my kids to know, when they look at photographs of me someday, that I loved them with all my heart.  That I always had their best interest in mind.  That I did the very best I could to teach them well.

And that there is always more to the story.

It all seems so simple, when you look back on the lives that touched our own. We can sum up in a few sentences about what someone accomplished, or what they were good at.  We can speak of their weaknesses and see the labels we affix to this thing or that.  But it is always so much more complex, isn’t it?  

When we are going through it, life is full.  We are tied up with emotions and responsibilities, with love and heartache, with expectations and disappointments.  We have talents and dysfunctions, strengths and despair.  If feels at times, complicated and reactive and random. 

And then, when enough time passes and you look back, you can see it as clear as the nose on your face.  

God was there. 

We all share the same ancestry.  We all have people who drank too much, like Noah, or those with pasts like the woman at the well.  Maybe someone was betrayed with a kiss, or ran away when they should have stayed.  Maybe another was wise like Solomon, or patient like Job.  Or perhaps we were blessed to have someone like Ruth, who stuck by us when it would have been so easy not to.

We all need to be held together by faith, to have hope, to know that we are not alone. We need a place to call home, a family, a second chance….  

There will be things that won’t be remembered one hundred years from now, but God never forgets them.  

He sees our tears, feels our pain, knows when our spirits are low. He doesn’t mind when we make mistakes, and He forgives us when we do.  He knows the yearnings we carry deep within us, and the prayers we share only with Him.  

And He whispers to us…I know the other side of this story, and it is good.

Trust Him, even when the path is uncertain.  Love, even when it’s hard.  Stand up, even when you feel the weight of the world is on your shoulders.  This is your history in the making.

Others may not always recognize or appreciate you or what you are going through.

But in time, the picture will be clear, and the evidence of God’s hand upon your life will shine through… He’s working it all out.

He doesn’t need a thousand words to tell your story, only a few.

You are loved. 

You are beautiful.

Smile.