As I looked through odds and ends in the barn today, I started to laugh at all the boxes of my husband’s sports memorabilia. When we were dating in college, I should have known that each sports poster put out by the team, every recruiting letter, and all the weekly plaques would be mine forever. As I counted the boxes, swearing to myself that they had grown in number, I noticed one I hadn’t opened before.
Inside I found letters he had written to athletes, and as I looked through their autographs and encouragement to, “Say no to drugs!”…I saw a cigar box. Surely he wouldn’t have old cigars he had snuck from childhood? Instead, I found his most precious treasures…baseball cards in plastic sleeves and a record in his childhood handwriting adding up the value of his treasures a dime at a time. What I saw next brought tears to my eyes: in a hard plastic case, there was a ticket stub from what was likely his first Nebraska Cornhusker game as a child, the team whose jersey he would be wearing years later as he ran onto the field.
As I looked at all those boxes, they weren’t just boxes of memories. They were pieces of a little boy’s dreams, tucked away in the most precious of spots because someday, they were going to be worth something. Someday, they were going to mean something. These treasures were held carefully by my husband’s hands when he was but a child, and his mother cared for them sweetly just as she cared for him. She fed those precious dreams and supported the little boy she tucked in each night.
As my sweet kids dream of who God might have them become someday, I will treat those dreams with a little more care than I did yesterday. Each little moment, each tender milestone is building the people God created them to be. The desire in their souls to be known, to be admired, to be cherished…I will stop and choose to notice.
So as I re-tape the boxes, I’ll be a little more careful and a lot more grateful for the experiences and memories that built the man God chose to lead our precious dreamers and me on this journey. I’ll wrap up his collections, and maybe we won’t store them in the barn after all. These were the days God used to craft the man I adore. I’ll treasure them deeply…grateful for the boy God was tenderly whispering to and growing all those days ago.
