nostalgia | a lesson in family history

this has been sitting in my drafts folder for over a year.  but it's still special to me: family usually is.

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Being a wonderful and sacrificial mother, my mom didn't ask for much this Christmas...except a little task called putting the old pictures in albums.  Ha!  "Little task..."  These pictures stretch across my lifetime and spill out a little on one side - from nineteen-ninety-four to two-thousand and six.  But as many as there were, I enjoyed every minute of it.  I have always loved perusing through old pictures, learning what life was like before I was even here, to tugging on memories buried down deep within the recesses of my mind.  There's something wonderful about searching my family's past to find things - new, happy, full, experienced, lovely things.  However, I do believe that I see the past with rose-colored glasses.  Everyone looks so exuberantly happy, and there seems to have been no problems at all.  Of course, I could have guessed that that's not how life goes, but I asked my mom anyway.  The past was filled with ups and downs, just like anybody's.  High moments, like the birth of a baby, or a wedding, and low moments where tension and family struggles take place.  But healing happens, and that's the beautiful part.  Nobody takes photos when people are fighting.  No one who's not smiling gets his picture taken.  But somehow, there were enough smiles for each year of life that I found there, in the dusty old shoeboxes and in the tattered, old-fashioned albums.  My family heritage, embedded in my dad and mom and explained recently by my great-uncle (whom I love so much), are things to be proud of.  I take such great joy in seeing my family.  I get jealous when I see the old photos of my parents spending time with cousins whom I don't see often, whom I wish lived closer.  I wish I had been there, in close relationships to those older "Chachis" and "Chachans" ("older sister" and "older brother" in Malayalam) to whom I look up now, with whom my parents spent time and to whom they, in turn, were the "Chachi" and "Chachan."  But I live in a wonderful time.  I may not have been as close to those cousins, those aunts and uncles, as were my parents, but I reap the fruit of those relationships.  I get the good effects of the time and the family bonds forged by those before me.  My sister and I (and Jonathan too) have had opportunities to be with the cousins, and one of those being practically a "family reunion" in August.  We are blessed.  I have a strong, Godly heritage running through my veins, through those old photos, through the stories that are shared when the aunts and uncles come to town, through love.  I am blessed.