Files of Life

The sun rose on this most interesting sight, and I have been intrigued ever since. Standing tall, all alone, was this big file cabinet. What happened to all the stuff that filled these four drawers? Was it shredded and placed at the curb on some recent Monday morning? Did someone take the time to scan and digitize the content that now resides on their laptop? Are these drawers still filled with files? I’ll never know the answer, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering.

This encounter with the file cabinet also made me wonder about what people do with the pasts we carry around in our heads and in our hearts. Every experience, good or bad, is filed away. Every decision, good or bad, is filed away. The things of which we are most proud and the things of which we are ashamed reside side by side in our “files”. As the years go by, these files fill up more and more drawers. They take up space and they are heavy and bulky and difficult to move, these file cabinets filed with our life.

To throw them away is to throw away a part of ourselves, to discard all that which has made us, well, us. There is a better, more gracious solution. The scriptures say, “To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

Those bad experiences, those poor decisions, those regretful acts do not define us. Even they are renewed and redeemed in the grace of God. Those moments of joy and fulfillment and peace, they point the way to the life we truly desire. Together, they are the stuff God works with as we become the person we are called to be, the person we can be, the person we long to be.

I’m not ready to keep my files at the curb, unlocked and available for all to see. But I do trust them to God, who not only knows the contents, but is constantly redeeming those files for my own good, determined for me to be the person I am capable of being, for me to find myself.

Peace.