Place Memories

While on a recent vacation, I checked into my hotel and was out the door again in under ten minutes. I was headed to a little bookstore and coffee shop that I adored. I had spent much of my travel time thinking about this little store and looking forward to spending some quality time there. So I cannot adequately express the disappointment I felt when I arrived at the location and discovered that the shop had closed several months earlier. I think I stood there for five minutes in a state of disbelief. I had tears welling up in my eyes as I walked back to the hotel. I asked the concierge what happened to the store. She indicated that the store had faced financial trouble, and then she helpfully offered several recommendations for other places. There was certainly no lack of bookstores in this college town. But I really wasn't looking for a bookstore.

I wish this was a story about my outrage over the large, impersonal, corporate conglomerates that drive local stores out of business. But it isn't. I had spent several hours at this bookstore with someone I loved. We drank tea and talked politics; we ate cookies and argued about literature. It was a place full of memories of someone who was now gone and someone whom I terribly missed. I had spent one of the happiest days of my life at this bookstore and I was back to relive those memories. The bookstore was gone, and although my memories were still in tack, I still felt a sense of loss. Humble as it was, it was a special place for me.

Places, houses, tangible objects have the power to evoke something powerful within us. A piece of jewelry can take us back to the most special day of our lives; a childhood home can evoke feelings of great love or great sorrow; even a particular outfit can remind us of some occasion or some special person. But the Bible urges us, again and again, to not hold the things of this world too tightly. We are instructed to hold tangible objects loosely, to not invest our hopes and dreams in material things. I understand the reasoning behind this: we must be careful not to make material things our idols. We must maintain our focus on the eternal things that really matter: how we love God, how we love each other, how we treat each other.

But standing in front of that bookstore with tears in my eyes, I fully understood another reason why we are admonished not to put our hopes in tangible things. Places and objects are so incredibly fleeting, that we will always be disappointed. But memories and emotions are so incredibly powerful, that they can always be a part of us. And so we are encouraged to live in the moment, not in the memory of a place, or a time, that has passed and may not longer be physically there. Nor can we live in the expectation of an uncertain future.

I had traveled hundreds of miles, in part, to recreate an experience that was essentially impossible to recreate. It had been one moment in a particular, day, time, and season of my life. And although that past moment was precious, I was in this particular time and in this particular place, fresh and anew. I knew that I needed to embrace the joy of a moment not ever seen, instead of a past that I could not relive. It is a lesson I need to take with me and hide in my heart: the past is precious, but the present is priceless.