Half The Photographs Are Still In The Box

There is one album finished.

It is a good album. You did it properly. You put them in order, you wrote the year on the little tab, and when you got to the end of it you felt something you have not felt since, which was the feeling of a thing going right.

And there is the box.

Top shelf of the closet, or under the bed, or in the room nobody goes in. And in it are your mother's wedding, and the house you brought the first baby home to, and a whole summer where somebody was still alive and nobody knew it was the last one.

You have not lifted the lid in about four years.

I want to sit down with you for a minute before we do anything else, the way you would sit with somebody on a step outside a building rather than march them back inside it.

Because here is what happened, I think. The album was a beginning. And somewhere in the weeks after it, the beginning turned around and became a measurement. One done. All of that left. And a measurement is a very different thing to live with than a beginning is.

Then the box got heavy. Not with pictures. With the arithmetic.

And on top of the arithmetic sits the other weight, which is that some of those photographs are of people who are gone, and going through them is not a filing job. It is an evening. You know that, and part of you has been protecting yourself, and I am not going to call that avoidance because it is not.

He is the one who began it

There is a sentence Paul writes to a church he loved, and I want you to notice who is doing what in it.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6, King James Version)

He which hath begun. Not you which hath begun and then let it slide.

The whole sentence is built around a work that God started, and around the plain confidence that a work God starts does not become somebody else's problem the moment it goes quiet. Paul is not writing to a church that was doing brilliantly. He is writing from prison to people he could not reach, about a work he could not supervise, and he is calm about it.

You are held inside a work somebody else began, and Philippians 1:6 puts the confidence for that on God rather than on your consistency. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ancient prison letter sit down beside a closet shelf in your house tonight, and the written word is where the confidence comes from.

I know the box is not the same as your soul. But the way you think about the box is the way you have learned to think about yourself, and that is what we are actually here for.

You have been counting the wrong thing, and this is yours to put down: God does not do arithmetic on a work He started. It is written in Philippians 1:6 that He performs it, and the Spirit of God is the one pressing that in rather than my saying it warmly.

One album is not one twelfth of a job

Here is the lie in the arithmetic, and it is a good one.

You finished one album. Your mind filed that as one twelfth of the work, or one twentieth, and then held up the remainder as the real number. But the remainder is not a measure of you. It is a fact about how many photographs a family takes over fifty years, which is a lot, because they were happy.

The album you finished is not a fraction. It is an album. It exists. Somebody could take it off the shelf tonight and sit with it.

You were never behind, and the one album on that shelf is a finished thing rather than a down payment on a debt. Scripture calls what God begins a good work and never once calls it a quota, and His Spirit is the one who takes the word quota out of a person's hands.

And this is where I want to be careful with you, because there is an easy encouragement here that would be no use at all. I am not going to tell you that if you do twenty minutes a night you will have it done by Christmas. That is a schedule, and you have had schedules, and the schedule is part of what put the lid back on.

You are free of the whole timetable tonight, and it is already settled that the work does not depend on you finishing it. Philippians 1:6 hands the performing of it to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a deadline off a person nobody asked to carry one.

Twenty minutes, and no order at all

So here is the ask, and it is deliberately small.

Get the box down. Take out one handful, whatever is on top, no digging. Look at them for twenty minutes.

Do not sort them. Do not put them in order. Do not go and find the empty album and do not decide which decade to start with. Some of them will be blurred and out of focus and of somebody's elbow, and you can leave every one of those exactly where it is.

And if one of them stops you, stop. That is not a failure of the twenty minutes. That is the twenty minutes.

You have permission to sit with one handful and get nowhere, and heaven has never once graded a person on how far through the box they got. The good work in Philippians 1:6 belongs to the One who began it, and the Spirit of God is present in a living room with a shoebox and no plan.