Lego Time Machine
I found a time machine this week. Unfortunately it isn’t one that I could use to literally go back in time, but instead something that connected my present with my past in a beautiful way. It is this strange Lego of two wheels with a center connecting brick. This very old Lego piece is probably at least 40 years old and came from a set I had when I was a kid.
I found this piece in a bin of Legos in our house this week along with who knows how many other thousands of Lego pieces. In that same bin were pieces from Lego sets of Lego Friends, Star Wars, Marvel, Frozen, Cars, Ninjago, and who knows how many others. What was beautiful about all of these is that it felt like a beautiful connection of the child I was to the child that is still a part of me today. They also show the ways I have seen my own children grow from when they got their first sets to even the ones bought within the last few weeks. And they are the same pieces and they fit together perfectly.
This isn’t just a “love song” to Lego (although that would be pretty easy to do) but instead recognizing the ways in which our past is still our present and our present is rooted in our past and how they all come together to what we will continue to become. They aren’t separate but they are linked together and that can be both an honest and a beautiful thing.
In my readings today from the Gospel of John (chapter 8) there is a debate between Jesus and the religious leaders about the connection between the past and the present. Part of the debate is over who controls how the past informs the present. Clearly we have been wrestling with this as a people for a very long time. We still do it today when we try to hide from the realities of our individual and collective pasts thinking that they do not inform who we are today. But they do. We are linked to what has been in beautiful ways and in ugly ways and we need to be honest with ourselves about all of it. As much as I smiled about this Lego piece, it also brought back a memory of when this very piece led to a fight between me and one of my friends of who got to use it. So it is all in there - the beauty and joy of the past and the hurts and wounds as well. We don’t need a time machine to go back to where we have been. It is all still present with us.