I have a shelf full of yearbooks representing most of my years in school. I remember fondly the excitement of yearbook day. We celebrated the opportunity to collect signatures. Each year, I got a fresh set of acronyms and well wishes. LYLAS (love you like a sister). Stay Sweet. I hope we are in the same class next year. Those books serve as bound time capsules for each year of my schooling.

Six years ago, I lost three family members within 6 months of one another. Grief and chaos swallowed up that time in my life. In the middle of the chaos, boxes of belongings ended up in my brother’s garage.

When I visited my brother recently, I brought home a carload of those boxes. I stood on my back porch on a warm day this week and sorted through them. In one, I found an East Mississippi Junior College yearbook from 1937. My grandmother at age 18 smiles from the top row of page 27.  The book pictures her with her freshman class.

I leafed through her yearbook, looking at the inscriptions. Her peers and teachers adored her. That does not surprise me at all. If I ever encounter a time machine, I will definitely go meet my young grandmother. By all accounts, the trip will be well worth my effort.

My childhood revolved around my grandmother. Big Mama served as my sun, the center of everything good. She lived 98 years, 80 more after that yearbook. She could not know at 18 years old how her life would unfold. That thought captured my attention when I found the yearbook. That 85 years in the future, her 50-year-old granddaughter would pour over the pages looking for fun facts about the woman she loved so dearly and misses every day.

We do not get the benefit of knowing what is ahead. Therefore, the best we can do is live a life worthy of our calling. In a culture heavy with division and unrest, we can be a light in all the places we set our feet.

Imagine with me, you are handed a yearbook for your life right now and had an old-fashioned signing party– 85 years from now, what inscriptions would people read? Our lives are time capsules for those to come. We don’t get yearbooks for life, but we leave our signatures all over the lives we encounter.

What inscriptions are you leaving?