Milk and Honey Day 32: Why We Need Reminders
I'm not a particularly sentimental person when it comes to stuff.
As a former military spouse, I've moved enough times to know that boxes get heavy. Every move forces you to decide what is worth carrying and what isn't. Most things don't make the cut. Furniture gets replaced. Clothes wear out. Decorations come and go. Over time, you learn that possessions can become as much of a burden as a blessing.
But some things earn a permanent place.
A gift from a child, a handwritten letter, a family heirloom, or an old photograph can survive decades of moving cuts because they carry something larger than themselves. They become connections to people, relationships, and moments that helped shape who we are. At some point, the object itself becomes less important than the memory attached to it.
Several years ago, I learned just how much those things mattered.
During my divorce, my ex-husband went through my memory box and all of our family photos and destroyed almost all of it. Old photographs, letters from friends I had kept for decades, cards from family members who were gone, keepsakes from important moments in my life, and memories that could never be replaced. The loss itself was painful, but what stayed with me most was watching the effect it had on my children. Even at five and seven years old, they understood that something important had been lost and were devastated that their father destroyed family photos.
Those weren't just my memories.
They were theirs too.
It forced me to think about why we keep certain things.
On the surface, a photograph is just paper and ink. A letter is simply words on a page. A keepsake is an object sitting in a drawer. Yet anyone who has ever lost something meaningful knows those descriptions miss the point. The value was never in the object itself. The value was in what it represented and the memories it helped preserve.
We keep reminders because memory is fragile. Details fade. Conversations blur together. Entire seasons of life become harder to recall with each passing year. Then something unexpected happens. We find an old photograph, come across a familiar object, or read a letter we haven't seen in years, and suddenly memories we thought were gone return with surprising clarity.
I think that's one of the reasons reminders appear so often throughout Scripture.
God repeatedly instructed His people to remember. Stones were stacked beside the Jordan River so future generations would ask what happened there. The Passover meal was celebrated year after year so the story would not be forgotten. Again and again, God gave His people tangible reminders because He knew how easily human beings lose sight of what matters.
Art often serves a similar role.
The paintings we choose to live with are rarely random. They often remind us of a place, a person, a season, a feeling, or a truth we don't want to lose sight of. Sometimes they reflect where we've been. Sometimes they remind us where we're going. Sometimes they simply help us hold onto something important when life becomes noisy and distracting.
That's one of the reasons I care so much about creating meaningful art.
I don't expect every collector to see exactly what I see in a painting. In fact, I hope they don't. The beauty of art is that it becomes part of someone else's story. A painting that reminds me of God's faithfulness may remind someone else of a loved one. A landscape that feels like hope to me may remind someone else of home. The meaning expands as new people bring their own experiences into the work.
As I've worked on Milk and Honey, I've realized many of these paintings function as reminders for me. They remind me that seasons change. They remind me that growth often happens slowly and invisibly. They remind me that hope still matters before the harvest arrives and that God's faithfulness isn't limited to the moments when everything finally works out.
Maybe that's why we keep certain things.
Not because they are valuable in themselves, but because they help us remember what is.
