Lass Words — The lost people on the wall

Sharon and I are at Cracker Barrel in Birmingham for lunch. I’m usually impatient waiting for my food to arrive. Not here.

I immediately grab the peg board game, knowing full well it will defeat me. I always leave four or five stranded pegs, whereupon the game informs me, accurately, that I am ”just plain dumb.” I have noticed the internet is loaded with videos showing how to win the peg board game, but that seems like defeating the purpose. The whole idea is to find out if you’re getting any smarter from your failures. So far, I am not. 

Eventually, I give up and start pondering the unique memorabilia that adorn the walls of every Cracker Barrel. I am most drawn to the large collection of old family photos. Countless frames of large reunions, young couples and individual folks. They all have that early 1900’s look about them. The women with their hair tightly up, flowing white blouses with high collars, long black dresses. The men all wearing dark coats, white shirts with thin black ties, handlebar mustaches and hair parted down the middle. Nobody smiles in these shots. Why aren’t they happy?

Mostly, I wonder how all these portraits wound up on a Cracker Barrel wall.

These people are somebody’s great, great grandmother or grandfather. Why aren’t their likenesses treasured in their descendants’ photo albums? Did these pictures get passed down so many times the future generations no longer recognized them and just discarded them? 

Christian footprint

I find that unsettling and ponder whether that’s going to be my fate some day.

Maybe my great, great grandkids will look at a photo of me and wonder who that weird guy wearing knee socks and shorts is. It makes me wonder if I am leaving the kind of Christian footprint my family will remember, value and pass on. Have I “brought them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” as Ephesians tells us?  

A hundred years from now, will my picture be up on a Cracker Barrel wall, right next to other amusing, old artifacts, like the silly smartphones people used before they learned to communicate telepathically and the antiquated 4K flat screen TV sets that had long ago been replaced by three dimensional holograms? 

It’s never too late to improve your Christian legacy.

Don’t wind up on the wall at Cracker Barrel.