Day 81 – Photos, Slides and Negatives (Throw)

In the box I brought inside the other day from the storage shed, I found some old records and stacks upon stacks of photos.  I actually threw away hundreds of prints, dozens of slides and a multitude of negatives.  I kept only a third or less of the total.  Getting rid of the negatives was no big deal – with all the changes in technology, there’s really no reason to keep a negative strip when you can easily reproduce any picture by scanning it.  Likewise, the slides were nothing special and I have no way to view them anyway.  I did save two slides – they were shots of my father on his fishing boat.  It wasn’t until after Dad died (back in 2002) that I realized how very few pictures I had of him… The pictures I threw away were not hard to part with either.  After years of college, seminary, youth ministry and camp counseling, I have photo after photo of school kids, teenagers, classmates and even coworkers whom I hardly recognize … or don’t recognize at all! These pictures spanned from my time in LeMars, Iowa (right after college), through seminary days and my time as pastor at Marietta (where I was living when I met Melissa).  Looking through all these pics left me with an “It’s a Wonderful Life” sort of feeling…