I Deleted The Photograph

You deleted it in the car on the way home and you have thought about it since.

One photograph. The four of you, on the worst day of the trip, and every single face in it wrong. Somebody crying. Somebody looking away. You, with an expression you did not recognize, holding a bag.

And you looked at it at a set of traffic lights and deleted it, and it took about two seconds, and there is no version of it anywhere.

And here is the thing you cannot quite explain, which is why I want to write about it. You are sorry. Not in a large way. But every few weeks it comes back and you notice a small regret about a photograph you deliberately destroyed and could not have wanted to keep.

Let me tell you why that regret is right, and what to do about it, because something can still be done.

You did not delete a bad photograph. You deleted the only record of a real day.

Hitherto hath the LORD helped us

There is a moment in the first book of Samuel where a man puts a rock in a field to mark something, and what he says while he does it is the whole point.

Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us. (1 Samuel 7:12, King James Version)

You have a pattern in the written word for marking a hard day rather than tidying it away, and no bad afternoon has ever once been disqualified from being marked. 1 Samuel 7:12 has a stone set up after a battle rather than after a celebration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a photograph deleted at a set of lights.

Look at what the stone is for. It is not a trophy. It is a marker that says something happened here and God was in it.

And look at the word. Hitherto. Up to this point. It is not a claim about how things turned out, because Samuel did not know how things would turn out. It is a mark at a location, in the middle of an unfinished story.

You are able to mark a day without knowing what it meant, and nothing about a marker has ever once required the day to have gone well. It is written that the stone was named hitherto hath the LORD helped us, which is a statement about the ground covered rather than about the destination, and the Spirit of God is what lets a woman keep a record of something she did not enjoy.

And here is the part that goes at the heart of what you did in the car. The stone was ugly. It was a rock in a field. Nobody put it there because it was attractive.

We have almost entirely lost that. Our stones are photographs, and a photograph has to be flattering or it gets deleted, which means our whole record of our own lives is now filtered for how everybody looked.

You are able to keep a record that nobody looks good in, and the worth of it has never once depended on any face in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who breaks a filter in a person, and 1 Samuel 7 has a plain rock in a field doing the work of remembering.

What went with the photograph

Now the practical part, and it is about what was actually lost.

The photograph did not matter. Let me say that plainly, because you may be braced for me to tell you off about it. It was one image and it was genuinely unflattering and you had every right to delete it.

What matters is what went with it, and it is this: that day now has no record at all.

Every other day of that trip has something. There are pictures of the good afternoon and the meal and the water. And the day that was hardest, the day that actually cost the most and that everybody in this family got through, has nothing.

You are able to see which day got left out of the record, and no part of that has once been you being dishonest about your own family. The Spirit of God is what shows a person a gap in their own account, and it is written that the stone was set up specifically to mark a place where things had been hard.

And here is why the gap matters, and it is not sentimental. In about six years, one of your children is going to be having a hard day and will need to know that their family has been through hard days and that they were not the end of anything.

Where do they look? The record has only good afternoons in it. And a child looking at a record of nothing but good afternoons concludes that a family who is struggling is a family that has gone wrong.

You are able to give them evidence that this family survived a bad day, and no photograph has ever once been the only way to keep it. It is written hitherto hath the LORD helped us, said out loud over a stone in a field, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain record into something a child can lean on later.

Three sentences, and keep them

So here is the assignment, and it is not about photographs at all.

Write down three sentences about the worst day. And keep them where you can find them.

Not a paragraph, not an account of your feelings. Three sentences, plain and factual, and preferably including one thing that is faintly funny, because there always is one.

You are able to write three plain sentences about a day nobody enjoyed, and doing it has never once been you dwelling on something. 1 Samuel 7:12 has a stone with a short sentence attached rather than a long explanation, and the Spirit of God is with a woman writing four lines at a kitchen table.

Something like: it rained and the middle one was sick and we ate in the car. Somebody said the thing about the seagull. We got back at nine and everybody slept for eleven hours.

That is a stone. Ugly, factual, and it will still be there in six years.

Then keep it where it can actually be found. In a notebook, in a note on your phone in a place you would look, taped inside a cupboard. Not filed somewhere careful, because careful filing is where things go to be forgotten.

You are able to keep something without making a project of it, and three lines have never once needed anywhere special to be worth keeping. It is written that the stone was set between two named places, in the open, where anybody would see it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a household starts keeping the true record.

And then, if you like, tell your children it exists. Read them the three sentences. Watch what happens, which will almost certainly be laughing.