Baseballs and Whiskey Bottles... Priceless

One of the things that I did while on vacation last month was to clean out my remaining “stuff” from my parent’s house. I have not lived in my parent’s house since the spring of 1995, so any of my possessions that remained there could not have been all that important...right?


When all was said and done, what I found ranged from junk to gems.

In the junk pile could be found random things that held no meaning in my life and didn’t even get my attention long enough to ponder why they were even in my room.

The gem pile was filled with the good, the bad, and the ugly...all of which are priceless. In the this gem pile of my past could be found my home run baseballs that reminded me what I can accomplish when I really focus.

There were a variety of name tags and other former job related items that reminded me of how I obtained many of my skills that help me live into my vocation now.

I found my scrapbook and so many other pictures that took me back to my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood...a visual history with a plethora of emotions.

There were also things like an empty whiskey bottle that I kept as a reminder of things I never wanted to do again and then there was a huge knee brace that sparked in me that I really wasn’t 10 feet tall and bulletproof, nor had I ever been.

Though not everything in the gem pile made the trip back to Nevada, each gem had something in common. Each gem in the pile, regardless if it conjured up good memories or not, each lesson I learned from those events helped make me who I am today; and while sorting through and cleaning out those memories there were some of those lessons in which I needed some reminding.

Within each of us is found the good, the bad, and the ugly, but it is important to remember no matter how many lessons we chose to learn the hard way, we are still created in God’s image and therefore belong in the gem pile...each of us is priceless.