ONE Hundred
Lora Parsons
The Ashland Beacon
I’m sitting on the couch in our living room with several heavy “Deluxe Unlimited Capacity Albums” for photos stacked on top of a folding table and each other to my left. These were put together by Don and Frances Sorrell, a complete labor of love. To my right is my phone, ready to call, email, or text for backup information from others who share this memory space with me. On my lap is my laptop. In front of me sits a piano bench with an extra 32” inch flat-screen TV on top, one my daughter brought home until she returns to Asbury this Fall. Between my laptop and TV is an extra HDMI cord my son dug out after carrying up the TV. He used it to mirror my computer screen onto the larger TV less than three feet away. I was getting a little motion sick looking from album to screen to album to phone. He literally and figuratively hooked me up.
Below the TV are timeline-type documents that my mom brought over to help with the information gathering that would be needed to complete this church project. I’ve been working on taking pictures of the pictures inside these photo albums to turn them into a vinyl “bulletin board” of sorts that we can hang on the walls of our sanctuary to remember our past. We have much to be thankful for. Our heritage is rich, with our church turning 100 this month.
But I find myself in an odd space at the moment, closing the albums, returning them to their boxes, sorting out which ones go to which church family member that lent them to us for this project. They’re heavy. Like, carry-no-more-than-two-at-a-time heavy. There are eight of those big guys in addition to the other stack of seven or eight smaller albums. These big ones are sturdy; they won’t fall apart. Their photo-cling pages are (except for one, single page) still clinging to their paperboard backing (and I fixed the one that was a little rumply with a small piece of double-sided tape to help secure it in place). These albums are strong and refined to look at. Dignified in appearance and noble in the duty they serve.
The other smaller albums that aren’t quite as heavy have been stacked and put away, also, ready to be returned to our church library shelves or their rightful owners. The baggies of pictures given by church members have been carefully placed in a tote to get them back as well. I feel a sadness at having to give back these pictures I’ve spent hundreds of hours digitizing and formatting so they can be easily shared. I find myself wiping tears as I close them up and put them away. Little pieces of a place I love are inside these albums, and love oozes from out their pages. I’m drawn to the history in them, the stories they tell. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude that I got to spend so much time with them, got to know them like I did. It feels a little bit like a death, a separation from the many faces contained in them, and I can’t stop the tears from falling. I am just so thankful for what they contain and for how my life has been blessed by the people inside their pages.
I can flip through some and find nursery workers taking care of me as a toddler, and I can turn to another one and find the same being done by a different person with my own babies. I can find pictures of my grandmother’s Sunday school class in an album next to her mother’s Sunday school class. I can catch glimpses of my Papa Sorrell’s hands in the hands of his dad whose images are inside these pages. My personal family history is here … great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, my sister, cousins, my own children, their cousins. The family count is high, and I love that my connection to this place is generations deep. But there’s more than just family here, too. They have a family that I’m not related to but love just the same. They have a story that includes births, deaths, illness, heartache, victories, and love. They have the story of a people that spans decades of time, a people who pray, eat, travel, worship, grow, learn, and live life in connection with one another.
The 100 years’ worth of faces, dinners, picnics, baptisms, communions, foot-washings, revivals, homecomings, pastors, Sunday school teachers, youth group outings, WCG events, apple-butter-makings, sermons, songs, Easter egg hunts, Vacation Bible Schools, carwashes, and bake sales … I realize that are all just one family, with one name, and one purpose. We might sit in pews with the family we arrived with and call ourselves by all kinds of different last names. But we are one because of Jesus. One album won’t contain us, and neither will one decade. However, “one” describes us perfectly. We are family. Brothers and sisters because of the blood of Jesus.
The words “one” and “hundred” are quite opposite one another when you stop and think about the singularity of the first word and the multitude contained in the last, but the two together suit our identity perfectly, making this month’s word a simple one to consider. This September Meade Station Church of God will be a hundred years old, but we will always be only ONE.
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