A few weeks ago my family packed up our van and headed out on a road trip. We drove from Indiana down to little Port St. Joe in Florida for a week at the beach, back up through Atlanta to see some family, and then off to Virginia to see some dear friends, before returning home. We soaked in some amazing views as we rolled through 2,800 miles of the country.

Do you like to road trip?

We love it. The long drives force us to sit and do nothing but talk with those that we love and take in the stunning creation out the windows.

On this last drive, we saw a vast array of land. I loved seeing the corn-growing in Indiana, the mountains in Tennessee, and the ocean with leaping dolphins in Florida was pretty spectacular. The landscape changed from flat grounds to the most gorgeous mountains and hills. My mind kept thinking how it looks like God had textured and layered his painting so perfectly. One scene that got me was my parent’s back yard. Those Pine Trees…I have all the heart eyes in the world for them. It’s a funny thing growing up in Georgia. Pine trees are common. They may even be annoying or a nuisance cause they are just everywhere and the pollen they spew in the spring can be ridiculous. After moving to the mid-west, it suddenly hit me one day that my flower beds have rocks covering the ground rather than pine needles because there are no pine trees. My heart ached a little. Pine Trees are home to me.

Even as I type this out and think of that picture, I feel myself fighting a lump in my throat and watering eyeballs. It’s amazing what a picture can do, isn’t?! A single picture can bring back a flood of emotions. It can cause you to recall lots of memories even to the point you smell and taste them. Hence the phrase: a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s so true.

It reminds me of my childhood postcard collection. As we camped, hiked, and traveled as a kid I would buy a postcard wherever we went. It was my little snippet of that trip. That single image sparked a family trip, a camp out gone bad, a birthday hike, or even just a long day in the car fighting over seat space. The memories, the images, the postcards are snippets of what was my reality, My life. These are my moments that I never want to forget.

I can be guilty of sharing TOO many images these days. Social media has made it so easy to upload a picture that sometimes we miss the moments. We are focusing on the actual image and capturing the perfect shot rather than living the moment. The order is reversed in how these memories should go.

I want to recapture the sacred picture. The picture that floods my brain. The one that I go back and look at 20 times that week and smile, laugh or cry aloud at the moment it captured. These pictures might not be the most edited. They might not be the prettiest, but they are real.

It’s these thoughts that make me want to try a new regular series on on the blog called Eddy’s Postcards. Eddy, is also a memory from my younger days. It’s a nickname I picked up while mentoring some pretty awesome girls. They took my initials and had fun with it. Now I really feel old with all these “remembrances of younger Erica days”. Oh well. 

I will post a picture every week and give a little blurb about why that picture is my favorite picture from that week. I hope this idea will help me think less of the posing of pictures and more of the pictures that are the real moments I never want to forget.

For example, this picture from our trip is one I have smiled at so many times since we have been home. I love how I can hear the boys squealing with delight, how Matt is literally in the middle of the action capturing it all, and Matt’s sweet dad is standing off to the side all by himself looking reallllllllly worried about all the fireworks going off around his family. It’s awesome.

I hope you will follow along with this series, and it can encourage you to remember the moments that matter and let some of the others go. We are in this journey of life together, and I hope we can (in some small way) spur each other on to be stretched, focused on what matters, and give life all we can.