What Decay Cannot Keep

A box full of my watercolor paintings got totally wiped out. An entire year’s worth of work. These were paintings I’ve done from 2025. The fact presents itself with the bluntness of inventory: one cardboard box, destroyed; dozens of hours, destroyed. Watercolor is not merely pigment on paper but time made visible: early mornings of concentration, experiments that failed before they succeeded, small acts of seeing translated into color. To lose such a box is not like losing an object from a shelf. It is to lose evidence of labor, a record of one’s own attention.

The frustration comes in waves. The loss came not through theft or carelessness, but through termites, those pale, unremarkable creatures capable of ruining a year’s labor in silence. There is also a peculiar irritation of knowing that grief over “mere paintings” can feel disproportionate. Yet I feel it is entirely justified. We do not mourn paper; we mourn what the paper held of us.

Also, there is frustration in that not merely are the paintings gone, they were taken by something so mundane, so absurdly small. One imagines loss arriving with thunder. More often it arrives quietly and utterly.

Perhaps that is why losses like this trouble us beyond their apparent scale. They remind us how much of life is made of fragile things: paper and wood, certainly, but also laughter that vanishes as soon as it is heard, conversations we do not know will be our last, ordinary afternoons whose beauty we only recognize in retrospect. Much of what is most precious to us cannot be stored safely. It can only be received and then relinquished.

Scripture does not deny this fragility; it places it within the larger promise that nothing entrusted to God is finally lost. The Christian hope is not that cherished things never perish, but that grace remembers what the world forgets and restores what time and decay undo. The paintings will not return. Yet the God who wastes nothing can gather even perished beauty into His keeping, and in ways not yet visible, to make all lost things live again.