Enduring love is the true backup to memories

By Mia Pohlman

The storage on my phone has been full for a while and I've been ignoring it, trying to cram every last screenshot, email and text message onto it as is humanly possible.

Thus, while my family and I were recently on vacation in the mountains, I thought I could outsmart my phone's storage space by taking all of my photos using Snapchat and saving them to the app's "my memories" feature, intending to screenshot them once I got home. Voilá -- I would have pictures without needing to delete anything.

That decision was a mistake. Somehow, somewhere, driving from Wyoming to Nebraska on the way home, my phone deleted all of the pictures and videos from my Snapchat memories that I'd taken since last July.

Thankfully, I had most of them backed up, but gone were all the photos from vacation: the pictures of the Teton mountains, my mom hiking to a waterfall and the quirky Yellowstone bus I'd fully intended to frame.

The lone survivor from our trip? A selfie of my sister and me buckled in the backseat of our car on day two of the drive home, sporting unwashed traveling hair.

Yikes!

It was a good reminder to me: nothing and no one is mine.

Not even my memories.

Everything is to be held with open hands, and even something as intimate to me as my memories -- the remnants of my experiences that have shaped me -- are gifts from God and are ultimately his.

Like the gift of happiness, I'll enjoy taking pictures, the pictures of my experiences and my memories themselves while I have them, but if I lose them, I will trust my Lord loves me still, is bringing good out of everything, and I never really needed them anyway.

We don't have to fear the loss of our own or our loved ones' memories; there is grace there, in the surrender, in the returning, in the repetition and learning to really listen.

Forgetting doesn't mean an event didn't happen or wasn't real; I don't think time can change gifts given to us out of love. Love is the virtue that remains and endures.

My friend Claire recently sent me the "Suscipe" prayer written by St. Ignatius of Loyola for his book of Spiritual Exercises. "Suscipe" means "receive" in Latin.

The prayer goes like this:

"Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me."

To let God be even closer to me than my ability, my memory and my understanding -- that is a beautiful petition.