My Memory Gallery Wall Part 1

I heard a great sermon a couple of years ago.  A guest speaker at our church spoke about remembering the things that God has done in your life and teaching them to your children.  His family had created a memory wall with a shadowbox full of reminders of the times that God has been faithful to their family.  He encouraged us to find a way to tell the story of God's faithfulness in our lives.  I decided that I wanted to do that for our family, but I had trouble deciding what it would look like, so I kept putting it off.

On an unrelated note, I had been seeing a lot of gallery walls on Pinterest, and I really liked the way they looked.  I started a Pinterest board with ideas to do someday...

January was a hard month for me.  There were no major tragedies or sickness in our family, but a combination of sad news, ministry fatigue, uncertainty and deaths in families I knew and other things I could not even actually put my finger on all hit all at one time.  I do not typically struggle with sadness, so it caught me by surprise.  It almost seemed to take my breath away.  Somehow in the middle of it all, my desire to make a memory wall and a gallery wall came together and I started obsessively working to make it happen.

I spent way too much time thinking about my wall and nailed way too many actual nails in the wall.  It was all I could think about for a week or two.  It is still very much a work in progress, and it is nothing that will ever appear on Pinterest, but it was just what I needed to remind me that God is faithful and has worked in my life in so many ways.  I wanted to write a few posts to document the stories of God's work in my life, so that the next time a January rolls around I can remember.