Smoothing the Blemishes of Life

My two eldest children, Fall 1985 (Thumb-sucking is no flaw. I did it too.)

It's a New Year, a time for looking forward and back. I've taken advantage of holiday and vacation leave from work to hang around home and spend it with family. I'm also working on a major family/personal history project to scan old photos and get them in digital files in the cloud to share with all my kids.

I've tried to hit the big years of each child's birth. I can't take the whole 30-some years chronologically as that just discourages me. So, the years of interest let me skip around and I get more variety and more done through the phases of our family life.

Scanning photos can carry flaws of several different types. The original photographic print could be marked with finger prints or other marks. The screen on my scan can pick up little bits of dust even as I frequently wipe the screen with a lint-free cloth. And there can be blemishes or the minor wounds of childhood on the subject of the photo.

I'm no expert photo-shopper but my program does help me manipulate brightness, color, and to blank out the flaws picked up from the print, scanner, or the person. I admit that cleaning off a big zit in my forehead is simple vanity. But when I fix blemishes for my wife or kids, it seems more like loving care. I want them to look good and be good not out of fatherly pride but to represent the ideal way I see them as I love them.

It's a bad analogy to compare to God's love and healing of our hurts and forgiveness of our sins. Yet I would do anything I could for those I love, family and friends to see them healed of those hurts. My Faith in Christ and Hope in eternal salvation is that God's love is great and powerful enough to do this. That's what keeps me going.