³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

From Dr Jim Harris, Art Historian: 
I’ve been back from my holiday less than 24 hours and, weirdly, I’m already having trouble remembering exactly what happened. I know that sounds ridiculous but it’s really hard to get an overall sense of the thing. We stayed with our friend Isa and her family in Laramie, Wyoming, but instead of a sweeping cinematic vision of a vacation whose story can be traced through social media from leaving home to putting the key back in the front door, I find my mind filled with tiny, apparently unconnected details: unusual bread in the supermarket; the smell of the rocks we climbed; the sound of a coal train whistling in the distance, away across the prairie. 
It’s not that we didn’t see and do amazing things, it’s just that I mostly remember putting up the washing line; trying on old clothes in the second hand store; inventing nicknames for family members for no apparent reason (I’m looking at you, Mighty Goblin Weasel); or just gazing in wonder at amazing new landscapes out of the window of the car. Although to be honest, that was mostly just me. These are the inconsequential bits and pieces that make up the consequential whole. We all remember them differently but they fit together to form a nuanced and glittering shared memory. 
The way the Bible talks about Jesus is a bit like this. Four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John record things he said and did, some the same, some different, but crucially the things that mattered most to them and the people listening to the story. And from the patchwork of remembering emerges a picture that is truer than a diary or a documentary because it reflects the disparate ways we each see and recall the world. And I think that’s important, because despite our best efforts to make our lives into coherent movies we can play back over and over, I reckon holiday is the moment for letting go of the script and watching life just happen, or even fall apart slightly. 
And then we can look back and be nourished not by a ‘director’s cut’ but by the shared joy of a time whose fragments of memory can (and over the years will) be reconstructed and re-edited in a thousand different but equally beautiful ways.