Count Your Blessings, Day 8

Photos

Collage of Todd

As some of you may have experienced today, I kind of had a moment where I tagged a bunch of my photos and probably overloaded your notifications on Google+, sorry about that.

But over the last couple of days, I have been going through my photos looking for things that I have been inspired by, thankful for, or just to reflect what I wanted to write about. In the process of doing that, I have had the opportunity to look back through several years worth of photos. Some of them I really didn't like seeing again, like the ones of my mom when she was sick or my younger brother when he was in hospice. There were a few that were awkward, seeing people you haven't seen in a long time and you kind maybe possibly let that relationship slip further away, on accident.

But overall, it's was a really neat thing to go through them. I got to re-live my children when they were younger. 

I have to admit, I miss my daughter being younger. 

My son on the other hand, I am so thankful that he no longer has that hair.

 Oh, so very thankful.

The fun of photos is that I get to see how I have changed and how the world around me has changed also. Except my wife, she just seems to stay the same. I got to see the kids from the last 10 years of our youth program and look at some of the fun things we have done with them. Kids we were close too, some who just showed up from time to time, but our's none the less. A lot of those kids have graduated and gone on to college, the military, or just life. Some have gotten married. Some are getting married. Some have had kids of their own. Some even stay in touch with me just to remind me how old I am getting.

But, it's always fun to visit the past, to enjoy and savor moments that you may have forgotten. To see some of those mistakes and hopefully realize you are better for them, or at least learned from them. To see some of the good times and remember those moments and how they touched your life.

Photos have a way of transporting us to those times, and allow us to remember things, some good, some bad, but all a part of us, captured in a moment in time, to be viewed every once in a while.

Ultimately, I have a sort of time machine. No, I can't go into the future, but I can visit the past, and even though I can't change any of the past, I honestly don't think I would want to. 

I am who I am today because of all of those snapshots.

The good, the bad, and even the blurry.