I'll Let Her Tell The Story

Auctions provide the student of human nature with amazing insights to the inner workings of people's minds. One week ago last Saturday Cheryl had "inside" information concerning a local sale being held by the sons of an elderly lady of our community. Now in her octagenarian years she was an inveterate collector of all things collectible and many not. I agreed to accompany her and suggested that we ride our bicycles(my thought being that we couldn't possibly purchase anything if there was no way to transport it), silly me. It proceeded to rain(oh, the best time to be at an auction is when it rains 'cause everybody goes home and you can get boxes of things for a buck), she found a girlfriend with a van, I was dispatched to the house to get my car and 23 boxes of "stuff" later it's history. I assumed there must be treasure in her recent aquisitions and in the process of seeking it I found the print you see below. Dark brown at the edges in a frame at least as old as the lady who collected it was this picture of a girl driving a single horse buggy. She wasn't really very visible so I removed her from the frame and began processing the print with my computer tools. This was the first time I had attempted an undertaking such as this, and discovered that the same techniques that are applied to ancient manuscript studies apply to projects sucn as retrieving a lost image. It took about six hours and a proper amount of frustration, but there she was, "Yesterday's Lady," looking as close as I could get her to the manner in which she may have appeared originally. She's been sitting in a file waiting for the right time to be shared. How often I ponder, have I run across people much in the same state as she was when I found her? Those who are dirty, tattered, browned around the edges, wet on by the world and barely discernible to the eye(there must be a hundred or more ways to describe people that, at first glance appear to have little worth), and yet, beneath the surface of each there is another creation of God, replete with facets capable of dazzling the eye and inspiring the imagination. I guess the task, then, is one of searching out the image beneath the surface. We can love them the way they are, and leave them in the box, or we can enter in to discover how truly beautiful each one is, a unique creation to be admired for what they were, what they are, and what they will become when exposed to the light of God's love. Preacher.