Sepia-Toned Memories and the Kingdom of God
Our dreams, they are made out of real things
Like a shoe box of photographs
With sepia-toned loving.
-Jack Johnson, “Better Together”
What you seek is seeking you.
-Rumi
Drew and I recently had the pleasure of hosting a touring musician and his artist wife in our home. J and Torrey are the kind of people you meet and almost instantly know you could be good friends if only you had a shared context and they did not live on the opposite side of the country.
During J’s performance at our church Saturday night, I witnessed the rapt faces of the audience be transformed by his gifts of storytelling and song. I watched in wonder as Torrey made everyone feel loved and welcome at the concert, even though she’d never attended our church and had met these people mere minutes ago. It was a night of joy, tears, and community woven throughout with the invisible chords of Shalom.
This is the Kingdom of God, I thought. I didn’t want the night to end.
As they walked out our door on Sunday morning to travel to their next gig, I noticed Torrey’s tattoo: a stream of elegant blue words scrolled across her foot, surely saying something beautiful.
“What does it say?” I asked, always curious to know which words people choose to inscribe upon their bodies forever. (Will tattoos remain in eternity?)
“Seek the Kingdom,” she said. “When I was in India on a mission trip, a woman told me: ‘All you need to do is ask: Where is the kingdom of God? and follow it, and all the pieces of your life will fall into place.’”
She didn’t know that our sermon that morning was about seeking God, or that upstairs I had a card on my desk that simply said “Seeker” to remind me of how I want to live and a necklace on my bedroom dresser inscribed with the word “Seek.”
“I love that,” I said before hugging her goodbye.
A couple hours later in church, we sang a song I’ve been singing since childhood:
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God
And His righteousness
And all these things shall be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia.
As we sang, I thought about foot tattoos and the wise woman in India and all the ways I’ve sought the Kingdom of God in my own life and all the ways I haven’t. I left church with a fresh resolve to “Seek First the Kingdom” at whatever cost.
* * *
On Monday I woke up wondering, What does it look like to seek the Kingdom of God today?
The answer came, but I almost missed it.
I found myself at a thrift store later that morning, tired and distracted, wandering aimlessly among rows of furniture and thinking thoughts such as Do I have what it takes to re-finish and paint that beautiful antique hutch that I cannot afford? and then employing a great deal of brutal self-reflection: No, I do not have that degree of focus and dedication in me right now, and it is highly unlikely that I ever will.
And then I saw it: the Kingdom of God, lying on top of a $22 dresser.
It was a forest green, 6-inch square book with the word Photos and some cheerful gold flowers inscribed in gold—small and unassuming. I picked it up and began to flip through several decades worth of two couples’ wedding photos. The weddings from 1965 and 1976 both featured sepia-toned images of shy couples in stiff wedding clothes and their modest celebrations involving family and friends at a church and around a dining room table. The festivities were as simple as some tiered deviled eggs on a lace table cloth, but joy was clearly written across every face.
One pre-ceremony photo from the ’70s showed a grinning young groom with floppy hair and gigantic glasses sitting in a metal folding chair, tying his wedding shoes. A discarded pair of retro striped tennis shoes with wadded up socks was sitting in a box beneath his chair, and his tie was half-undone. I smiled and began to wonder, Who are these people, and whatever happened to them? It was the only thing I found that morning that I seriously considered buying. There was no price tag, so I held it up to my friend who does happen to have what it takes to masterfully refinish and repurpose furniture and asked, “What do you think?”
“Just take it,” she said. “They’re not going to sell it; they probably just found it in one of these drawers.”
With a thrilling mix of daring and church-girl guilt, I slipped the small album into my purse. Upon reaching home, I went through the photos more slowly and tried to piece together the story of the lives I had stumbled upon. On the inside cover, I found the first and last name of the owner and the two couples’ wedding dates written in elegant, spidery hand writing—the old-fashioned kind we rarely see in our age of chicken scrawl and hasty texting.
When I was able to put names to some of the faces I saw in the photographs, I wondered, Wouldn’t it be nice to return this album to its owner?
Naturally, I turned to my computer to ethically stalk them and found that a woman named Leola (whose name was written on the “this book belongs to” line) was the mother of the two grooms in the wedding photos. Though the family was originally from Louisiana, I discovered that one of the couples (Wayne and Linda, married 1965) happened to live in a town nine miles away from me and their address was conveniently listed in the White Pages.
At this point, I began to get nervous and excited. I cannot explain why, but I felt prompted to return the album.
“I could actually meet these people today,” I thought. I could be a family hero: Restorer of Lost Memories.”
Lofty visions ensued of me knocking on Wayne and Linda’s door and presenting their mother’s cherished album to them and all of us crying and then sharing glasses of lemonade on their front porch and them telling me their life story and how their marriage survived across the years as we reminisced about the good old days.
“What if, and why not?” I wondered, a little surprised at my boldness and the ease with which I decided to go.
Dearly hoping that Wayne and Linda would feel more delighted than creeped out, I first wrote them a card explaining how the album came to be in my possession. Wondering if I should be a little concerned for my own safety as well, I slipped a dulled knife into my purse which I have forgotten to return to our church kitchen for two years now and stepped out the door in search of the Kingdom of God.
Fourteen minutes later, I pulled up to a house with a neatly manicured lawn and an open garage being emptied of its contents by a man and a woman about my age. With album and card in hand, I walked up the driveway but thought it might be nice to double check with the two workers if I had the correct house.
“Excuse me,” I said hesitantly, “Do Wayne and Linda still live here? I have something that belongs to them.”
“They do,” the woman said. “We’re their grandchildren, and we’re helping them with some chores around the house today.”
Feeling like my chance of actually meeting Wayne and Linda was slipping away, I nervously explained, “Okay—it’s kind of a cute story, I found this album that belonged to them on a dresser at a thrift store and wanted to return it to them...?”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “We’ll be sure to give it to them.”
Crestfallen, I smiled my thanks and got in my car to drive away. Through their front windows, I could see the dim outline of people walking around their home. Wayne and Linda: so close, yet so far. While driving home I thought, That wasn’t the ending I was hoping for. As I tried to figure out why I was so deeply disappointed, I realized that my primary motivation for returning the album was for the sake of a good story and feeling like I had done a good deed—something I thought God was inviting me to do.
But as I kept driving, I felt the Spirit impress a deeper truth upon my heart and I began to wonder,
What if seeking and following the Kingdom of God looks a lot less like reaping fruit and a lot more like sowing seeds, the growth of which we may not see on this side of Eternity?
Can a life spent planting seeds for eternity be well with our souls?
In a favorite song of mine, artist John Mark McMillan asks a similar question:
So shall I plant sequoias
And revel in the soil
Of a crop I know I'll never live to reap?
As I continued to seek resolution for the story I had entered, these words of Jesus came to mind:
For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.
(Luke 19:10)
And then it hit me:
I thought I was seeking and saving the lost photo album, but really it was the Spirit of God seeking and saving the part of me that I’ve lost to fear and cynicism.
This is the heavily-armored part of me that believes it is still possible for one small life to touch another’s in a way that creates ripples of grace extending far beyond what we can see. It’s the part of me that wants to believe a single moment could change one’s life, and that saying “yes” to those moments matters because it is in those unassuming moments that seeds are scattered which cover eternity with their blossoming. The part of me that still believes risks are worth taking and that God can do more with our paltry loaves and fishes than we could have ever asked or imagined was coaxed alive again, this time in the form of a small photo album and the sepia-toned memories of people I will never meet.
As it so often does, the reality of God’s Kingdom snuck up on me that day in ways I never expected—it was beguiling, messy, relational, and unresolved. It was as if God was saying,
“Come out and play! Don’t worry about not knowing how the story ends or about getting every detail right. I am a good God and the very best storyteller. I have your life planted in the palm of my hand. Trust me with this.”
So where do we go from here, and what do we do with the hopeful seeds of eternity planted in our hearts—good seeds that might not bear fruit in this life time?
I do not have the answers, but because of the adventure of returning a lost photo album I now believe this:
A crucial part of seeking the flourishing of the Kingdom of God on earth as we wait for heaven is saying yes to the manifold ways the Kingdom is seeking us.
* * *
Beloved, the Son of God came to seek and save that which was lost—even me, even you.
So when the Kingdom comes knocking, may “yes” be the ready word on our lips and the song of our hearts.
Jesus is the great Gardener, the planter of seeds and the restorer of stories.
May we entrust our flourishing to him anew today.
Amen.
To Go Deeper: Listen to John Mark McMillan’s The Road, The Rocks, and The Weeds. It’s just so good.