The walls of this house hold so much more than just a roof over our heads. There is a history here, that we have only gotten a glimpse of. A mixture of blue and white hand prints of missionaries past cover the salmon colored dining room walls. Different groups of people from all over the world have passed through these rooms and sat where I am sitting. Their handprints are forever plastered on the walls of this small Mokhotlong home, solidifying the work they accomplished here. There were more, I am told, that didn’t have the chance to make their mark in paint. Long before them, though, this home belonged to a boy and his family. A young boy that grew into a pastor and gave up his childhood home so that others could bring restoration to this place. I like to think that the variation of designs on the dinner plates upon which we eat our meals and the randomness in the collection of mugs that we consume our caffeine in were accumulated over time, just like those at my own childhood home. The plates reveal memories that we could never fully understand and the mugs tell stories that are beyond our grasp. The cracks in the windows show signs of a story as well and the breakage in the walls of this concrete palace show that there is a history here, whether we discover it entirely or not. There is a history that we will probably never be able to fully appreciate. We, unfortunately, are just passing through, though. We sit around two tables, sharing meals together and piling our belongings four Bibles high. We pass laughter back and forth and have late night conversations while the fire burning in the furnace slowly smokes us out. We have now become a memory in this house; we are in the midst of creating one. We are only here for a brief moment in the grand scheme of things. Soon, we will leave this place behind, taking nothing with us but stories and leaving behind nothing but a group of twenty handprints on the wall. Then we will move on in an attempt to make another house in another country our new home, temporarily. This life seems to be nothing more than memories and the act of creating new ones. We do, however, get to choose what others remember. We always have a choice. We either become a memory people cling to or we become a memory that others try and erase completely. We are either a good memory or a bad one; choose.
