For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kickstarter, it is a fundraising website designed to give those with  great ideas a platform to present their idea to the world, and then ask for funding from anyone interested in seeing that idea come to life.

Bands fund their indie albums, people create new ways to keep coffee hot, charge your iPhone or send something to space.

Recently, one idea has garnered a lot of press. The mini museum(http://www.minimuseum.com).

33 pieces of history. Pieces of the London Bridge, Abe Lincoln’s house and a triceratops horn. 33 nearly one-of-a-kind items for $299. I love it. I think it’s an awesome idea as it places things you’ve only heard about in your hands.

I want one.museum-13

But my desire goes far beyond the cool factor. And I couldn’t figure out why until now.

Stories.

It’s not 33 pieces of history. It’s 33 stories. 33 stories and the many stories that will be created talking about how cool the mini museum is.  Stories to be told around around something that holds stories already told.

I don’t want it for the cool factor, I want it for what it tells my heart. That I’m somehow more important for having it. That it somehow brings value to my existence.

It’s not that I need a piece of the Berlin Wall, but that I need stories. And part of me wants to replace the stories I do have, my past, with something better.

Because I don’t like my story.

I don’t like the pages I didn’t get to write. And I don’t like some if the pages I wrote myself.

I want a different story. I don’t want to be the son of an absentee father. The son of divorced parents. Or the son of a family that’s been through the hell we’ve been through. I’ve somehow bought the lie that something new and shiny can change the tarnish staining my past.

It can’t. Nothing can.

But it’s not the tarnish that matters. Because if you look below the tarnishing, you see the indelible ink imprinted on my soul.

“I’ll give you a full life in the emptiest of places… You’ll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You’ll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again.” (Isaiah 58:9-12 MSG)”

Museum or not, my past, your past is unchanging.  But it is not my present.  Nor will it be my future.

The stories I live will not be defined by the knickknacks on my coffee table, but by those I chose to love, and those who love me.  My past defined a large part of who I was, but the ink on my soul defines my future.  And nothing can change that.

For the Cross – Bethel Music