The Shoebox of School Pictures

The album was supposed to take an afternoon and it has taken three, and not because there are so many pictures.

Her granddaughter asked for it. She wants to see what Grandma looked like when she was my age, which is a nine-year-old's entirely reasonable request, and there is a shoebox in the closet with the whole run in it, six through eighteen, one a year, the same gray backdrop and the same combed hair and the same instruction to look at the camera.

She has them laid out on the table now in order, and here is what has taken three afternoons.

Six: too skinny, and that dress. Seven: the haircut her mother gave her. Eight: front teeth. Nine: she is not going to say what she thinks about nine. Ten and eleven she can nearly manage, and then twelve arrives and she remembers exactly what she was told that year and by whom, and thirteen through sixteen she has to turn face down, one after another, quickly, like a hand of cards she does not want. Seventeen is the one everybody always said was lovely and it is the one she can look at least, because she remembers what she was doing to be lovely in it.

Eighteen she has not gotten to yet.

She is seventy-one years old. She has raised three children and buried a husband and run a church kitchen for two decades and she is respected in three counties. And she is sitting at her own table unable to look at a picture of a six-year-old without finding what is wrong with her.

And that is the thing that finally stops her. Six. What in the world is wrong with a six-year-old. Who told her, and when, and how young was she when it got installed, that a photograph is a thing to be graded.

And you know that table. Somebody handed you a valuation before you were old enough to decline it, and now it runs automatically on anything with your face in it. It may have been cruel, it may have been careless, it may have been dressed up as advice, and it does not matter which, because a price set on a child gets carried like a fact and not like an opinion.

Take this in before we go one line further, because I think you have already braced for a scolding about vanity. You are not a vain woman and you never were. Psalm 139:14 says you are fearfully and wonderfully made and says it as a settled fact and not as an encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is sitting at this table with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Carved into the palms

There is a passage in Isaiah where God is answering a people who have concluded, reasonably enough given the circumstances, that they have been forgotten. And He answers it with an image so physical that it is startling.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:16

Graven. Not written. Not noted down. Cut in, the way a name is cut into stone, which is a permanent operation and a costly one and not something anybody does casually.

And notice where. Not on a list. Not in a book on a shelf. On the palms of the hands, which is the part of yourself you cannot stop seeing. You see your palms hundreds of times a day without deciding to. That is the whole point of the placement: He is saying that you are not something He has to remember to think about, you are in the line of sight of His own hands.

You are carved into His palms, and it was done long before anybody set a camera up in front of you. The written word says graven and puts it in the finished past, which means it is not a status that gets revised in the years you have turned face down; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that permanence into a front room with a shoebox open on the table.

And look at who He said it to. Not to a people at their best. He said it to people who had just said out loud that they had been abandoned. He did not correct their circumstances first. He told them where their name was.

Why grading yourself feels like honesty

I want to be honest about why this is so hard to put down, because if I pretend a habit like this should just stop when a person knows better you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

Grading yourself feels like honesty. That is the trap in it. It does not feel like cruelty from the inside; it feels like clear sight, like being the one person willing to say the true thing about you. Every one of those twelve gradings feels less like an attack and more like an accurate observation, and that is exactly why sixty-five years of being a sensible woman has not moved it an inch.

But look at six. There is no honest grading of a six-year-old. There is nothing accurate happening on that end of the table. Which means the whole system is not honesty at all, it is a habit wearing honesty's coat, and it has been wearing it so long that you have stopped checking underneath.

You were not weak to take it in, and you were a child when it was set. Zechariah 2:8 has God calling His people the apple of His eye, the part of the body a person shields without deciding to, and His Spirit does that shielding now at whatever pace He chooses and without asking you to earn it.

And there is a second half. Turning a photograph face down is a mercy you have been extending to yourself. You have been protecting a girl. It is not contempt that makes a woman turn thirteen through sixteen over quickly; it is that she remembers what those years cost and she does not want to stand in them again this afternoon.

You are not being asked to force yourself back into any of those years, and nobody is holding a clock on this. Isaiah 46:4 promised that even to old age and gray hairs He carries and delivers, which puts the carrying on His side for the entire length of a life; the same Spirit doing that carrying is the one who stopped you at six.

And if what came up off that table is heavier than a page can hold, do not sit with it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you can say one true sentence in front of.

What the granddaughter is going to see

Here is what stopped the three afternoons, in the end, and it was not a revelation. It was arithmetic.

The child asked to see what Grandma looked like at nine. She is going to open that album and she is going to see a girl. That is all. She has no grading system, because nobody has installed one in her yet, and she is going to look at nine and think: that is Grandma, and she had a dress like mine.

And whatever this album is, it is also the first lesson that child will ever get in how a woman looks at pictures of herself. Which means the way you handle nine, out loud, in front of her, is going to matter to her for about sixty years.

You have been given something to hand her, and it is not a system, it is the absence of one. Scripture says He has graven you on His palms and your walls are continually before Him, and a name cut into a hand is not periodically re-evaluated; the Holy Spirit is the one who put a nine-year-old's question into a house where a shoebox had been sitting in a closet for fifty years.

So the table is not a record of faults. It is twelve photographs of somebody God had already carved into His hands before the first one was taken. And six is fine. Six was always fine.