Wait my daughter until you learn how the matter turns out.
Ruth 3:18
Recently one of my friend’s wanted to learn how to cross stitch so naturally she came to me because who of her other friends (in their 20s) knows how to cross stitch?
Not only does she (now) cross stitch, but she also knits and, I found out, she scrapbooks. She said that she and a group of ladies all get together and scrapbook. I told her I was mad she hadn’t told me sooner! “Oh,” she said, “You scrapbook?”
“Well, no…” I confessed, “But I want to!”
It’s true; I may have cut and glued a few pictures onto a page when I was 10, but taking the time to print pictures and embellish them with glitter, stickers, and pretty handwriting is not something that I have invested any time into in my adult years. But, as I told my friend, I want to! I admire how women can take photos, admission tickets, wristbands, the scraps of their lives, and turn them into meaningful works of art that capture beautiful memories.
I have found myself many times holding on to boarding passes and admission tickets for years, only to stumble across them and ask myself why I kept this junk? What is the point of it? Sometimes I have thrown these scraps out. Other times I have kept these scraps; our stub from when we visited The Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, the movie ticket from the only movie my husband and I have ever seen in theaters together because the memories they evoke seem to justify my keeping of these mementos.
So there they sit, in the one box I allow myself for my “sentimental” keepsakes. I find myself asking, “Are these things keepsakes, or are they just junk? Is this detritus indicative of a life well lived?” Sometimes it is just such insignificant scraps that, when pieced together, tell the story of a life, or a portion of life, well lived and cherished.
Sometimes life’s scraps aren’t so pretty. Sometimes putting them into the scrapbook would make pursuers pause and question why you chose to include something so unlovely in your work of art. Maybe it would be a symbol of the hard time before the really good life event. Perhaps it looks like the last paystub you received from a company before they fired you, before you started the business you love.
I think of the story of Ruth in the Bible; she had a lot of scraps. She marries a man and they are young and happy and then he dies, along with the other men in his family, and she is young and destitute. She could go back to her parents but instead she decides to cling to her mother-in-law, Naomi and piece together a life with her. Ruth then has to collect the literal scrap from the harvesters in the field so that she and Naomi can have food to eat.
Ruth’s faithfulness and hard work are noticed and she catches the eye of the wealthy landowner in whose field she has been gathering the scraps. God pieces together the scraps of Ruth’s life and not only gives her another (rich) husband, but blesses her and she becomes one of the lineage of Jesus.
It’s hard to see in the everyday details what the bits and pieces of our lives can add up to be, but God has it all figured out ahead of time for us. He knows what the point of all the trials of our lives are. And as Romans 8:28 says, He works everything together for good, to those who are called, according to His purpose.