Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Lost photo found!

Lost photo found! This photo of my Mom from 1954 is one of my favorites. I’ve been looking for it ever since we moved my Mom to Texas in 2010.

I finally found it! It was behind a couple of other photos and still in it’s original frame. Ever frugal, my Mom evidently wanted a change but didn’t want to spend the money on a new frame so she just put other pictures on top of it. (She also did not like clutter so would not have wanted to increase the number of framed photos, or shelves to hold them.) By the time she moved here she seems to have forgotten what she did with it.

When I talked to her about it again recently she was dismissive, “you have lots of pictures. You don’t need more!”

The reason I found it at all was that I was removing some of her photos from their frames to scan and put in a photo album. I don’t have enough wall space for all of them so they were still in the antique blue suitcase that we packed them in when we moved her here. I wanted the suitcase for something else, and thought it would be nice to have the photos in an album where we could look at them more easily.

My first discovery was an old picture of my Dad (’57) behind a photo of my parents taken in 1988. I wondered if that could be what happened to the missing photo of my Mom. I had almost given up hope though, by the time I got to the last 8x10 frame. When I took the top photo of my parents and me from ’91 out of the frame I discovered her senior portrait from ’51-52 just beneath, and below that was this one from 1954!

I was thrilled!! I called my brother immediately to tell him the good news.

The next day I started to wonder though, “Would I have found the picture sooner If I had listened to God better?”

I prayed about it a lot over the last five years. It seemed like every time I prayed for wisdom about where it could be, the thought “the blue suitcase” usually came to mind. James 1 says that if we pray for wisdom we should expect God to give it to us. I believe that. But, since I knew I had already looked in the blue suitcase several times, I dismissed the thought as an annoying mental tick that I kept coming back to for no good reason. By all outward appearances the photo was not in the blue suitcase. God knew, however, that it was. I had no way of knowing that. But I suspect God was leading me and he would have helped me discover the answer sooner. I mean, when I prayed for wisdom and the thought “the blue suitcase” came to mind, I could have gotten up and walked over to it and opened it. Then I could have asked Him to show me the next step and He may have done just that. I’ll never know of course. But either way It’s found now. And I am thankful!