Paper Can Outlast an Empire
On archives, family journals, and why humans preserve what matters
I’ve always had an affinity with paper. Even as a child I loved paper, in the form of Lisa Frank notebooks and folders in the early 90s craze of rainbow colored cats and unicorns.
As a teen I collected beautiful notebooks to fill, but sadly, many sat empty because I didn’t want to ruin them. I don’t think I realized then why paper mattered so much to me.
Now having been to the National Archives and the Library of Congress it cements what I love about paper. It’s not the medium itself, but rather what it holds. There are armed guards surrounding 4 pieces of paper that signify our nation’s separation from England. You could feel the weight of that in the room as we stood trying to take it in. Real human signatures of brave men have sat on those pages for 250 years, declaring freedom for our nation. Paper can outlast an empire.
We saw more papers that hold the values our country is founded on, an entire collection of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,000 books, a research room dedicated to understanding, poetry, and so much more.
God gave us the gift of literacy so we can share His thoughts with the world. The Megiddo mosaic was written with stones to show a community that Jesus is God.
Paper holds value because humans express value on it. Paper feels more substantial to me than a typed up document or even this post. It’s why we still write books and want to hold them in our hands and annotate our own thoughts. It’s why I’m building a family culture of reading and writing. Our words matter, stories matter and as Sally Lloyd Jones says so well, every story whispers His name. I could feel that sitting in the room with an ancient text proclaiming that Jesus was the real deal. I felt it looking at the Gutenberg Bible. I felt it looking at Thomas Jefferson’s library, a man who made a big impact on our country had read the same words I do now. He was known by his creator, and he knew him too. We might have felt “museumed out” after so many visits, but what a gift.
Paper holds value because humans express value on it and my great grandfather is proof of that. We have near fifty of his hand bound, handwritten, illustrated and deeply personal scrapbooks on our bookshelves and in boxes. It’s proof that humans preserve what we believe is worth remembering. The Declaration of Independence is guarded behind glass because of what it means to our nation, but family journals and Bibles hold equally sacred evidence that a person lived, thought, believed and loved at a particular moment in time.
History isn’t just national treasures, testimony isn’t only for the famous, preservation begins in homes.