Losing the Boundary Stones

I am an almost compulsive saver. If there are screws or fittings left over after an assembly project, I save them. If I have a few inches of a board left after building something, I save it. For years I saved all the essays I wrote in Bible college and seminary. Long after I switched to digital research methods, I saved the texts and commentaries I had collected over the years. All the snapshots of family events from the years before digital photography were sorted and saved in two file boxes.

Occasionally, I would throw something away if it had sat unused for decades, but inevitably, I would need that very object within days of discarding it. My wife and I have downsized several times in the later years of our fifty together. When we chose to move full-time into a travel trailer, storage units became necessary to hold the things we couldn’t bear to part with. Our rationale was that we would probably get off the road and move back into a house, and therefore we would need the things we had stored. We spent more on storage than it would have cost to replace all the stored items.

Before our most recent move back into a trailer, we discarded another batch of saved items. We have a small shed on our lot that is less than half full of things that won’t fit in the trailer. The snapshots I mentioned were among the few things we did keep. Until last week. We did another purge and after all this time we finally decided to dump the family photos. Then yesterday I came across a few items that were my fathers from the time he was in the service in WWII. I didn’t remember that I had them, but they surfaced in our ongoing sort-and-toss operation. His military ID, some high school report cards, and a tiny Michigan State banner were the most touching.

Among my dad’s things, I also found an address book from that era with names of people he knew at the time. Two different addresses for his mother and father may have confirmed a rumor I had heard that Grandma and Grandpa went through a “rough patch” in their marriage. Indeed. This got me thinking about all the things I don’t know about my parents, let alone their parents. Then I thought about my kids. Having come of age in the digital era, they will have the advantage of the Internet, social media, and sites like Ancestry.com if they want to track their family history. Maybe that’s why they declined our offer to give them their photos from our snapshot collection.

I had a moment of dread this morning as I lay thinking about having trashed all those photo memories. I can’t help but wonder if my kids will ever wish they had the faded records of family vacations, holidays, and everyday events that now lie buried in some Arizona landfill. I wonder if the lack of concern for family history is a symptom of the lack of interest in history in general. The old saying is that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. It is also true that they are denied some human insight.

An interest in history often leads to a respect for the people who lived that history. I wish now I had learned more about my parents when they were alive. The things they lived through before I was born made them what they were. They had far different histories than mine, their having experienced the Depression, a world war, and the spread of communism. My mom emigrated from England as an infant and spent years homesteading on the vast Canadian plains. My dad meanwhile struggled to find work until the War Department called him up. They met at a community theater production in Windsor, Canada and married just before the war. Dad spent WWII navigating DC-3’s over thousands of miles of empty ocean using a compass, and map, and a pair of dividers. Mom spent the war years raising their first child while living with her mother-in-law. Six years and three pregnancies (one miscarriage) after the war, I popped onto the scene clueless as to what I had missed.

Here’s the point of all this sentimental reminiscence. It is important for not just families but entire cultures to remain in touch with their past. Throughout the Bible, first Israel and then the church are commanded to remember their past deeds and misdeeds. They are called to remember the faithfulness of the God who is the God of history. There is a Proverb that says, “Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your ancestors.” In a literal sense it refers to property boundaries, but there is a wider sense in which it can apply to any type of boundary. In baptism and the Lord’s Supper we remember the boundaries that were redrawn with the death and resurrection of our Savior. The Scripture is full of “ancient boundaries” that give direction to our lives. When we remove those boundary stones, life devolves into chaos.

We must never lose our sense of history. In a sense, we are an amalgam of all the experiences we have had. Certainly, one can rise above damaging circumstances and make a new start, as we witnessed many times in our work with recovering addicts and ex-offenders. Likewise, a country can move beyond the painful realities of past missteps. Neither a person nor a country should try to rewrite their past or deny it. To mix my metaphors, we can use the ancient stones as a lesson and the foundation for a better life. Whatever we do, we don’t want to lose the boundary stones.