The Collections That Taught Me Grace

I collected things once, the way boys do, as if the world could be catalogued and kept. Stamps torn from perforated sheets, slipped from milky envelopes ordered from the Littleton Stamp Company’s ads in yellowed comics, promising kingdoms with names I could not pronounce. Three Whitman folders of Lincoln cents, blue cardboard with rows of empty circles waiting for pennies that never arrived, still hiding under my socks like a secret ledger. Football cards powdered with the brittle white sugar of gum, heroes frozen mid-leap—Bradshaw hurling thunder, Tarkenton dodging phantoms—stacked in shoeboxes under the bed where dreams and dust mingled.

They are mostly gone now. The stamps vanished into the air. The coin folders remain, half-filled, tucked under my socks like quiet witnesses to a boy’s ambition. The cards strolled off at a garage sale, and I hardly blinked. Golf, too—that demanding companion of fairways and fees—consumed my hours until I pressed the clubs into the hands of a youngster just starting out. He grinned like I’d given him Excalibur, and I walked away lighter, as though one season had ended and another had begun, the hours not wasted but scattered like seed, waiting years before their roots would show.

And in those moments of looking back—cards, coins, clubs—I sometimes play the old game of if only. If only I had bought Google stock instead of bubble gum, Nvidia instead of Buffalo nickels. If only I had known then what I know now. There’s a proverb for it: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Today it might be: if wishes were stocks, we’d all retire by thirty. But wishes are smoke, curling into nothing, carrying no one anywhere.

It is here the ancients interrupt. Solomon named it vapor, Marcus Aurelius saw it as dust, and Jesus asked what good it was to gain the whole world and yet lose your soul—and I, staring at my half-filled coin folders tucked under socks, began to hear them, whispering that even my losses were sketches for something truer.

Regret is soil.

Those lost collections, those empty penny slots, those afternoons poured into fairways or shoeboxes—none of it wasted, not really. It broke down the way leaves do in autumn piles, the way crusts of bread soften at the bottom of the bin, the way our foolishness turns when we finally stop clutching it—folded back into the ground until it was no longer trash but quiet food for something we could not yet name. And the blind spots of my parents, who were improvising like jazz musicians on borrowed instruments, passing along not polished wisdom but fragments, stumbles, and half-songs—all of that too was folded in. Which is why, as Lindsey reminds me, the work of growing older is not only forgiving our parents for not being gods in our eyes but forgiving ourselves for ever demanding that they be. And when that forgiveness finally takes root, it blooms like a green shoot you never planted, a mercy rising from the compost of time.

Now, sixty-three squares shaded on life’s grid, I am still a collector. But the currency has shifted. Not stamps or pennies or cards, but stories. Perhaps it was always my calling, first hinted at in the doodles of my Wisconsin boyhood—margin sketches of superheroes and ballplayers, careless lines that turned out to be the early draft of a vocation: teaching art, noticing the ordinary, gathering it into something worth holding.

So the lesson I wish I had learned earlier? That the world’s promises are mist. That the heart is the true frontier. That forgiveness matters more than getting it right. And that peace never comes by gripping harder, but by opening the hand to receive what has been given all along.

Maybe the real collection was always grace—gathered slowly, hidden in regret’s soil, blooming into stories that do not fade.

And maybe the better question is not what lesson I missed, but this: what am I still collecting now that will one day show me what truly lasts?

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Tags

LifeLessons #Forgiveness #SpiritualGrowth #RegretAndGrace #Storytelling #InsideOutLiving #FaithAndWisdom #FindingPeace #PersonalGrowth #FaithJourney #GraceInEveryday #LessonsFromThePast #CollectingStorie