It seems like life is made-up of all kinds of boxes.  There are lunch boxes that sometimes contain juice boxes.  There are check boxes on forms, drop boxes at video rental stores, squawk boxes at drive-throughs, kill boxes on battle fields, pencil boxes, shoe boxes, mail boxes, in boxes, out boxes, batter boxes, boom boxes, dump boxes, jack-in-the boxes and the proverbial “think-outside-of-the” boxes.  Whenever someone says to me “We need to think outside of the box”, I half-jokingly say “Wait!  There’s supposed to be a box?  No one told me anything about this “box” you speak of”.

I’ve moved from place to place many times in my lifetime.  The move was usually preceded by several days of going to stores looking for cardboard moving boxes.  We then spent days, or weeks, packing all our stuff into those boxes and then loading those boxes into our truck (sort of box shaped) and taking load after load of packed boxes to our storage unit – another box.  Once we found a place to rent in our new town, we would hire a moving company to take their really big box on wheels, empty our storage unit and deliver all of our boxes to our new address.  A lot of times, we never really finished unpacking after a move.  When our houses began to get cluttered, we put our excess stuff in boxes and stuck the boxes in an extra room or a shed – or rented another storage unit.

Our bodies are types of boxes.  They hold all our memories, our experiences, our stories, our skills, gifts and talents.  When those boxes wear out, someone usually puts our worn out boxes in big shiny boxes, and buries those boxes in box-shaped holes in the ground.  Sometimes, after that, friends and family gather at the box we lived in and they go through our boxes of stuff to try to learn about who we were.  That is, unless, everything we were about wasn’t kept put away somewhere in a box.

My wife shared a quote that makes me sad every time I hear it;

       “Most of us go to our grave with the music still inside us.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

She then shared a quote of her own that made me much happier and, frankly, made much more sense to me;

       “Sing, dance, shout, write, paint, be, do…..dobedobedobedo.” ~ Sharon Savage. 

Exactly!  None of those things belong in boxes; they are public expressions of what it means to be alive!

Boxes are nice to have if you need to carry lots of things from place to place.  They’re also nice for protecting things until you need to take those things out and use them.  But, things that get put in boxes forever tend to disappear.  If those things are forgotten, it’s the same as if they never existed.  Let’s not be like “most of the people” Oliver Wendell Holmes laments about in his quote; don’t die with your music, stories, gifts and talents still inside your “box”.  God gave them to you for a reason – make sure you let them out and share them with the world.

© 2014 Curt Savage Media

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