Lost

It’s been on my mind that I should catch up on about nine years’ worth of scrapbooking for my five kids. For the younger ones it should be fairly easy, since they’ve only lived with us for three years. The older boys should be easier, too, since I only need to complete their books through high school graduation, and they’ve already been out for a couple years. Kelsey’s will be more work, but since she’s still at home at the moment, I drafted her to help sort pictures, which will make the rest of my job much easier.

She and I made relatively quick work of organizing the prints from the old film camera and then began going through the digital photos. We found photos back to about three years ago, and suddenly there were no more. No photos of her first homecoming dance. No photos of Phillip’s graduation party. Most devastating, no photos from our trip to Ethiopia, when we brought Lewi and Lily home.

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that is true, then it is also true that I went a little crazy. I checked both of our desktop computers. I checked the camera’s memory cards. I went back and did it again, and then did it again. People would ask, didn’t you back your stuff up? Well, no, because I thought everything was on two computers and the memory card, which seemed like sufficient backup. I never delete anything, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone else would have, but since everyone uses the computers and the camera, the opportunity for mistakes is extremely high.

Phillip, our photo buff, used to upload his many photos onto our computer, but when he got his laptop he took all of his stuff off the home computer. I asked if he had grabbed our photos by mistake, but he looked, and looked again, and then helped us search our computers. Nothing.

If physical photos are misplaced, it’s certain they will turn up eventually. Things do not just disappear. I have heard that said of the digital world as well (be careful what you put on Facebook; it can come back to haunt you!), but in my experience, unless you know a computer god who owes you a favor, digital data can vanish.

They were gone. We had resources to reconstruct some of the things that were missing, including photos from Ethiopia, but it still made me sad that we had been careless with something irreplaceable.

Jesus told the story of a woman who could not find a coin, and she searched fervently until she found it. He tells another story of a father whose son ran away from home, but when the son returned the father rejoiced. Both the woman and the father threw parties. The precious thing that was lost was found; order is restored. All of the frustration and sadness melted away in the moment of reunion. There is no more amazing feeling than that.

Son Daniel, our resident computer geek, was out of town the weekend we discovered our treasure was missing. When he returned, I asked if he could delve into to the computer’s memory and look for the photos. We didn’t know when they had been deleted, or how, but perhaps he could perform some miracle and find them.

“Well, let me check,” he said. He returned moments later to report that, at some point, he had wanted to load a game onto the family computer, but since there wasn’t enough memory, he had (without telling anyone) taken all the photos off and loaded them onto his external hard drive. And there they were, safe and sound, as they had been for more than a year. 

He thought I would be mad. I was not. Not even a little. I was too busy rejoicing.