Open With Care

I graduated from Samford University nearly two years ago. When I walked across the stage, I got a diploma, had a party, got a new e-mail address and never looked back. Samford, like nearly all colleges, give their students a free email account their freshmen year. Samford also allows its alumni to still use the same account as long as they like. But, since I was going to grad school and was leaving Samford behind, I thought a new address was in order.

I wisely chose ssdavids@hotmail.com to replace my ssdavids@samford.edu. I had also heard that if you didn’t use the college account for six months, it became inactive and they could recycle it back through the system to a future student who might have my name. I was of course surprised when I signed into my account just a few days ago. It had been nearly 600 days since my last activity. I had nearly 3,000 unread messages.

It was like looking into a time capsule. There were emails from a myriad of people and lists I had been a part of. An old friend had written me a birthday message I had never gotten (maybe she thinks I hate her since I never said thank you!). There were updates on people’s lives I had worked with at summer camps, lots of junk mail, and even queries about speaking engagements. But as I gradually sifted through these messages I got the feeling I was looking less at a time capsule and more at a coffin.

That old email address was also associated with who I was then. I had received emails from lists like Christianity Today and from R.C. Sproul’s ministry – emails that I used to love getting, but now I had no connection with. Emails like these represented my rigid fundamentalism that I had shrugged off some time ago, content never to pick it up again. Indeed for me, the old had gone and the new had come.

The whole experience was eerie, spooky, even surreal – like if you were to go to your own museum. Most living people don’t have museums or monuments, so we can’t imagine what would be in ours: what highlights would be memorialized – or even worse – what mistakes and regrets. But the power of this trip down memory lane will stay with me. I learned that people change and we do no good when we force them into the cage that is our memory of them. The power of Christ liberates lives from all sorts of darkness. May we be the light that allows change and gives people the benefit of the doubt about who they are becoming, not who they have always been.