Returning last week to the small town where my mother grew up brought back a wave of memories. It always does.

My sister showed me the small house where my grandmother once lived, right across the street from the Baptist church. The outside of the place looked vaguely familiar; my sister, although barely a year older, could still describe the inside in great detail. I can’t remember it at all.

Then my aunt took us by the tiny guest cottage behind someone else’s bigger house where my grandfather lived for a time, and although it is barely standing now, I recognized it immediately. I couldn’t shape the interior in my mind but I do remember this: he cooked fried chicken for me there, and a peach tree stood in the back yard.

My grandparents are years gone, but being in their little town somehow brings them closer.

When I came home I wanted to remember more, so I dug out the cigar box my aunt sent to me some five years after my grandfather’s death. In it was an odd assortment of things he’d kept – as if he had emptied his pockets on his last day and filled the box with the random contents of his dresser tray and his pressed khaki pants, saying, “There. That about does it.”

A shaving brush. A pocket knife. One plastic coin purse. Tie tacks. Cufflinks. Two tiny Bible promise books, identical to one another. An old nickel lighter that wouldn’t spark, but still smelled of lighter fluid. And a pair of his glasses.

Nothing in the box was worth more than a few dollars – and not a single keepsake was suitable for display. But all of it was priceless. And every scrap of it told a story – his story.

The artifacts of Willis Smith’s cigar box were a leave-behind that said “Here. This is my stuff. Somewhere in my stuff you’ll find my story. Look if you like. It’s there.” Looking through these things, turning them over in my hands, caused me to wonder whether God might have a cigar box – and if He did, what might be in it.

At first I imagined small scraps of deity – a bell from Aaron’s robe…a feather from the ark’s “scouting dove”…a scrap of Joseph’s bloody tunic. Then it hit me. Too small, Leigh. Too small.

This world is God’s cigar box. And one day He will roll it up like a scroll. Everything that’s in it – even stuff that seems permanent to me – is only a small remnant of His glory. And one day it will become little more than a leave-behind of His unimaginable might and power and beauty.

One day, His person, His awesome presence, will make any former proof of same, needless. One day, God’s cigar box will seem like a distant memory, and we will see Him, face to face.

“Know therefore today, and take it to your heart, that the LORD, He is God, in heaven above and on earth below. There is no other.” (Deut. 4:39, NASB)

© Leigh McLeroy 2004