“What’s this?” My husband said holding something at the top of the stairs. “Why was it in the trash?”
He walked down the steps holding it in his hand.
It was a picture. Of me, when I was fifteen. I remember it was taken by my friend during a sleep-over at her house. I’m just standing there with my duffle bag over my shoulder. And I have kind of an awkward smile. My clothes don’t fit right. My hair is puffy.
“I hate that picture,” I told him. That was why I threw it away when Selah ran upstairs with it the other day in her hand, when she and her dad were cleaning out the basement.
“No,” he said. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I said.
“You don’t throw pictures of yourself away. We don’t do that. We keep them. These are memories, Bekah. Someday people will want to look back on pictures of us–even if we didn’t like them.”
I never knew he felt this way. Or that he had such great conviction about it. My daughter didn’t see me shove it into the trash.
But he saw it in there, the next day, in the little wastebasket in our bedroom.
And he reached down, and pulled it out.
He pulled me out of the garbage.
And isn’t this just what Jesus does?
We throw ourselves away. We bury ourselves under the garbage. We wish away some of our years. Wishing they never happened. Not even wanting to remember. Who we were, or how we looked then.
We just want to forget.
But He…
He loves us. We are precious to Him. And He carefully reaches into the garbage, and pulls out that picture of us. Looks at it with love. Cherishing the awkward smile, loving the puffy hair. Loving the girl under those ill-fitting clothes. And all the confusion of who we were. And wanted to be.
Holds us against His warm chest. And whispers, so gently, and so firmly, “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t throw yourself away. Not ever.”
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