The God of Photography--Who Knew!?

As one who has been blessed the past few years to teach a full time load during the regular school year as well as the summer semester, those two to three weeks between posting that last student's grade and emailing out first day syllabi are precious.

While that time is still full of work to prepare for the following term, it is also a time for playing 'catch up' with those items I really want to do.  Putting photos in albums, crocheting, reading a book for pleasure, researching ideas for the next seasonal or birthday party, or even something as simple as shopping--those things I can never find the time for get placed on one of my infamous "between semester" bucket lists.

Among the usual entries for this time of year was a long-growing desire I'd finally felt certain enough was God-given to voice in print.

 See @ photography class.

Unlike some pipe dreams that I didn't have a chance of accomplishing within a two week time frame (like crocheting a whole boy Pilgrim doll), this was actually possible.  The problem was I had no idea how to make it happen and even less of an idea of who I could contact for advice.  The only photography class I knew existed was at our State's flagship university, and that wasn't going to happen--financially or time wise.

And so, that line sat untouched while I plowed through the list, crossing out some and conceding others for the next inter-semester break at Christmas.

Then, five days before the semester started, I received an email from a friend of a friend--the online deal service Groupon was offering a one night 3 1/2 hour introduction to photography for a third of the normal price.

One night? Forty dollars?  I had goosebumps from seeing His fingerprints all over this desire in my soul and then fulfilling it when I could not.

A few weeks and one crazy drive into the city later, I dropped off the children with husband to sit in a large hotel conference room with fifty others who all wanted to understand how to take better photographs, how to use those buttons on their fancy SLR cameras...and how to decipher a foreign vocabulary of words like ISO, F stop, exposure compensation, metering, and aperture priority.

Two male teachers walked to the front of the room and began introducing themselves.  Instantly, the one named Randy left no doubt I was in the right place.

"Photography is all about light," he began.  "All you see is light.  You don't see the tree.  You only see the tree if light bounces off it."

With those words, I was back in my small college philosophy class of six studying Plato, listening to my professor say, "What surrounds us are not really trees.  They're just shadows, feeble representations of 'tree-ness' that stem from the realm of ideal where the perfect, true idea of a tree exists."

Even back then, I couldn't understand how my peers couldn't make the leap from this philosophy to a concept of God.  And here it was again--nothing exists in its fullness unless God shines His light on it. He is the author and finisher of all that surrounds us.

As I sat there dumbfounded at this sudden lesson on God's daily presence, the teacher continued, "Light's job is to move from its source.  It goes to the darkness and wakes it up.  Light is always moving from its source toward the darkness."

Yes.  His light is all about awakening our souls.  His light reflects off those who are His so that the world sees the light, not the individual. Although I didn't know it, this was the lesson I really came to hear.

A month later, every time I pick up my camera, I can't help to look for Him, for the light that has the power to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This is my lifelong desire, and not just in terms of photography.  I am a seeker of light, not for my own glory but for His alone.  May others look at me and see nothing but the Son.

A Nemo Approach to Faith

When my oldest son, Wyatt, steps off the bus each afternoon, his face lights up like only a child's can. Hazel eyes lift from the asphalt ribbon separating us to search for me in the shadows of a broad gravel driveway.

Like always, he looks past the cluster of animated black labs, two excited siblings, and even Opa. Only my face can elicit that face-splitting grin.

Then, he yells out a single word, "Mommy!!!", and takes off running like a wobbly turtle with its too-heavy shell.

Some days like today, that sprint ends with a tight, long-armed hug. Most times, though, he merely shoves his purple and gold book sack my direction and rushes into Oma's house for a glass of cold water and a homemade brownie.

In these moments, it wouldn't matter if earlier that morning, he had melted crayons all over the sofa or given my vintage dolls a crew cut.

I love and know I am loved.

The hours that follow before supper and bedtime are always an exhausting mixture of chaos, gratitude, re-adjustment to being together as a family again, sofa snuggle time with a stack of books, sharing about our day, more learning, and even more questioning. 

It often feels like I'm trying to squeeze in a day's worth of love and attention into just four short hours.

Lately, part of the afternoon ritual has included Wyatt presenting me with questions I just can't answer.

Apple in one hand, string cheese in the other, he throws me a curve ball.  

"How was God born?"

The words haven't left my lips, but I know I'm about to strike out.

"He wasn't.  The Bible tells us God was here before the creation of the world, before time, itself.  He always has been and always will be."

Even a six year old knows that this answer doesn't line up with his understanding of a world where God's creations share two things in common--birth and death.

And so, he argues with me.

Strike one.  All I can do is shake my head, shrug my shoulders in response.

"I don't understand it, son.  I don't know how God has always been. It doesn't make sense. But I believe the Bible is true, and that's what it says....maybe you can ask God one day when you get to heaven."

That only leads to other questions I can't answer about heaven, other things he's going to ask God when he gets up there.

Soon, Amelia is back at the table where we two sit, her outside voice rising to be heard.

"I don't want to go to heaven!" she frowns.

No amount of being told that she would be with Jesus is enough to convince her.  She vividly remembers last December when we buried Maw Maw under the live oak tree by the hay field.  To her, death means someone going away, means being put in the ground.   

"They put the chairs out there," she remembers.  "I didn't get to sit in them."

I sigh.  Strike two.

Wednesday night, Wyatt again brought up the subject of God being born.  Mommy might not have had all the answers, but he had obviously been busy thinking up answers of his own.

"Maybe there was just a tiny spot of light in the darkness, and then it kept growing and growing until God was born."

"No, son..." I began.

Faith doesn't have all the answers or it wouldn't be faith. 

Still, I feel so ill equipped to lead my three little ones to understand God when He is a mystery that only grows deeper and higher and wider the further I swim out into His depths.

When my children don't understand, when they are given the choice to believe God in faith and swim further into His Word or turn back in disbelief, mom repeating the words of my their favorite movie, Finding Nemo, may be the best way to communicate what their life-long attitude to God's mystery should be.

"Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.  Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming."

The child who does not seek is the child who will never find.

What's In YOUR Inbox?

Perhaps you're a convert to the new generation of books, the kind that don't need a licked finger to turn the page, that don't emit a distinctive crackle when you first expose their words to daylight, that don't smell when you burrow your nose amidst the pages.

Obviously, I am not a charter member of the Kindle or Nook book club.

While I may salivate at the thought of having that many books at my fingertips no matter my GPS coordinates, reading by the light of a back-lit flat screen just isn't my image of "curling up with a good book."

In my estimation, a book shouldn't get hot the longer I read it, not in the physical sense at least.  Instead, I should be able to pluck it from my shelves years later for a trip down memory lane as I read my marginal comments, skim the highlighted sections that spoke to that era of my life, all accomplished by a mere fanning through the pages.

A good book should be laden with dog-eared pages and, if becomes part of our family, should require a full role of clear packing tape by the time my children have gone on to heavier tomes.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned I had agreed to review an electronic book.

Surely, this was a mistake. I even contacted the publisher to make sure the email reminder was a mistake, thinking perhaps the postal service had simply lost my print copy in transit.  

But no.  Their reps politely told me the book was only available in an electronic version.  A further trip to their website confirmed just that.

How had I missed this!?  I don't read e-books!

The publisher kindly re-emailed me the link to the book, but I let it sit in my inbox a few weeks more, absolutely dreading the thought of staring at the computer screen for another hour after I finished teaching online.

Last Saturday, though, I decided to bite the bullet.  With my schoolwork done for the weekend and husband outside pounding nails into the ceiling joists of his soon-to-be home office, I installed an e-reader on my computer's desktop and sighed, submitted myself to the dread to come.

By page ten, I knew God in all His sovereignty had ordained this "accident."  Here in these pages was an answer to prayer, one I had asked for earlier in August about the same time I had initially agreed to review this text.

Leonard Sweet's Real Church in a Social-Network World: From Facebook to Face-to-Face Faith is a brief, sixty-page e-book that seeks to answer the question of why Christianity is losing its impact in our world.  

His answer is simple--we've lost the interest in creating relationships.  Sweet argues, "No other generation has had as much access to so much Christian teaching…We’re practically buried in Christian ‘information.’ Yet, at the same time, our society is less enamored of Christian orthodoxy today than ever before.  What’s missing is the right relationship, a deepening relationship with God” (16).

Relationship with God and with others is the key to being a better disciple of Christ and to reaching a lost world.

Sweet describes the underlying theme of Scripture as a story of God's relationship with man.  Our modern generation, however, is so concerned about being doctrinally correct that Christianity has turned into a game of who's right and who's wrong. 

He asks, "Does the church lack credibility with the culture because Christians would rather be right than be in a relationship with one another? We’d rather be right about our positions, right about our condemnations, right about having the ‘right’ interpretation of Scripture.  We’d rather score points than secure relationships with others who share the Christian faith” (40-41).

The result? As Sweet says, "We may be doctrinally correct, but we have become spiritual cadavers” (21).  Ouch.  But quite poignant.

While I was disappointed that this book was actually a collection drawn from three of his other books (What Matters Most, The Three Hardest Words, and The Gospel According to Starbucks), it was well worth reading and whetted my appetite for those other books, although I'm hoping they're available in print!

I still reel to think God's response to my request prayed in teary anguish had been sitting in my inbox all this time, had I only accepted the format in which the answer came instead of arguing that this wasn't meant for me and seeking something different.  

The Most Important Place for You to Be

The place to be on this muggy Friday morning wasn't at a job, the mall, the gym, or at the coffee shop catching up with a close friend.  Then again, the place to be on any given day isn't always the most popular, seemingly most important place to be.  Instead, it's anywhere God is at work.

That place might be the sidewalk, the checkout line at the grocery store, a gas pump at the fueling station on the corner, or even a public bathroom.

The location is not as important as what God is doing there. Where God is at work, that is the place to be.

For me today, that place was the foyer of a church so small my dad actually passed it up and had to make a u-turn to double back.  That place was a room overflowing with hundreds of Ziploc bags, all filled with the same list of items--deodorant, body lotion, 20 oz bottles of conditioning shampoo, toothpaste, a single ink pen, one white pair of socks, an individually packaged toothbrush and single bars of soap.

At a quarter till ten, the bags and boxes covered the assembly line of tables splitting the room's center and had begun to spill over onto the floors.  Still, the door kept opening to reveal more women carrying in bag after bag, box after box brimming with donations until there were only small paths left to walk between.

These women had gathered from different churches around south Louisiana for the sole purpose of packing some of the 1400 boxes to be used to minister to our state's women's prison next weekend.

The work didn't take immense bodily strength nor great intelligence.  It required no knowledge of prophecy or other Biblical theology.

It simply required willing bodies and hearts bent towards serving God and fulfilling Christ's command in Matthew 25 by ministering to a particular population in need of Christ's mercy and grace. 

Some women put together white paper boxes; some folded their lids.  Others checked to ensure the items were the proper size and transferred them from bag to box while another group put on the lids and moved them to a wooden pallet where they were stacked into a cube, then wrapped securely in clear plastic.

In about an hour, we packed 459 boxes before praying God's blessing over them.

Each box that was assembled represented someone's sacrifice in Jesus' name.  Before today, someone had sacrificed his or her personal time and money to purchase the items. Some of the women present today even sacrificed one of their vacation days just to be there to help out.

Being where God is at work takes sacrifice.  But what any woman there would tell you is the blessing they received from the giving far exceeded what little they gave.

What I'm learning is that the most important place for you and me to be may appear to be the least important place to be.  Yet, in God's economy, he turns everything on its head, changing the least into the most, the small into the great ,the weak into the strong.

Seeking out the small, seemingly insignificant places to fulfill the mission Christ has called us to do just might lead to some thing, some place larger than ourselves.

"For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me" (Matt. 25:35-36).

What You Can Learn from Grass

Father-in-law and I find common ground each morning while we stand around slapping mosquitoes, waiting for the 7:27 bus to come for my oldest son, Wyatt.  We speak of God, the children, and the plan for the day ahead, but inevitably, we come back to this plot of land where we live and work together, discussing the weather, equipment trouble, and how long it will take to dry the fields enough to drive the John Deere across them without getting stuck.

I tell him of my friend Jennifer in Iowa and the rains that will come too late for the bounty every farmer desires, of Ann and her husband watching the fields wondering if this year will be the year they won't get the crop in.

He nods his head in understanding and reaches out a long yellow stick to tap one of the black labs sneaking up to steal son's half-eaten peanut butter sandwich.

While crops in other parts of the country have suffered this year from drought, in my family's little patch of Louisiana clay, we've suffered the exact opposite with too much rain. 

More than twelve inches during Hurricane Isaac, six more just two weeks before that, and a 40% chance on too many daily forecasts throughout the spring and deep into the summer.

Whether it's too much or too little, the result is the same--a diminished harvest.

A good year with three strong cuttings would yield in excess of 25,000 bales.  This year?  We'll be blessed to harvest ten.

Come winter, an entire barn whose belly normally swells with the fullness will be empty until at least next summer, maybe longer depending on what God gives.

Still, the harvest is a time of hard work and excitement among my children.  Afternoon red wagons are abandoned in front of tall hay stacks and hollow bamboo in hopes of the promised ride around the fields to pick up the leftover hay.

A passerby might look across the newly shorn field and think all is finished.  Yet, they would be mistaken.

There is more left to harvest. Do you see?

The twins file into mother-in-law Oma's tractor with the pink license plate and drive to the edges of the fields, baling the remnant that some might just leave. Oldest son shares a cab with his Opa, driving behind the trio to scoop up the few remaining bales spit out in its path.

And then there are the broken bales, the ones where the baling twine snapped, spilling newly-packed hay back to earth in a messy clump.

This, too, is worthy of harvest.  It passes through the baler again before being picked up by the stack wagon and tucked away in the barn.

Every time there is a cutting, this scene plays out--the harvest of the many, then the going back to search out the remnant clinging to the fringes, to reclaim what was damaged and lost and then add the late-gathered ones to the overall harvest.

There's no way I can look at this and not see an image of the Father's plan for His harvest.

For Him, like for this farmer's wife, the harvest is not just about the many.

It's also about the broken, the already passed-over...the few.




Writing in Community today with:

What it is to Feel Appreciated

I straddle the tallest gnarled live oak root and sit down behind the twisted wisteria tree where the grass ever struggles in the shade of the dense leafy umbrella overhead.

Knees bent like a clothespin, I grind rhinestone-encrusted pink ostrich roper clogs into the pea gravel just enough to balance myself.  Instinctively, my ears listen for the whiny buzz of airborne Louisiana bloodhounds--swamp mosquitoes who can smell human sweat on the wind from across a hay field.

The mocking bird's joyful song, though, is what carries on the wind.  It's the same song she started the morning the cool front came through and hasn't quite gotten out of her system, each verse different as she imitates every sound she's ever heard.

My head dips low with the late afternoon coolness as I wait for sounds of the school bus shifting gears before she rounds the corner and emerges from the tunnel of trees that make her almost invisible in their deep shadow.

I'm tired.  Too tired.

To my left, I watch an ant struggle with a moth carcass who knows how many times larger than its tiny exoskeleton.  Other ants come along to see what all the fuss is about, but none line up to help him like in some cartoon.  They move on their way, leaving the ant alone again, turning the moth back and forth in his mouth pinchers.

I smirk cynically, tell him to give it up and turn to swat a couple mosquitoes who have found me.

When I turn back, the moth is gone.  My eyes scan the ground until they catch a flash of tattered white wing.  The single ant is not only succeeding in his quest but is now climbing the brick wall surrounding a flower bed, all with the weight of a dead moth in tow.

Millimeter by millimeter, the moth is pulled upward by invisible hands until the ant reaches the top and pulls his meal into the space between where his home is.

Wyatt's school bus turns the corner, and I stand to greet him, all the while thinking how much I identify with that ant.

Husband and I knew these next two years would be rough, but knowing and doing are two different things.

When I home schooled all three children, husband would spend the evenings with them, then put them to bed later than late.  Each evening, I would put in an eight hour shift teaching online and then the children and I would all wake up to begin our day long after the sun had stretched her arms over the pine trees lining the back of our property.

It was different, but it worked for our family.

Then, God made it clear that Wyatt was to public school for kindergarten while I continued to home school the twins for two more years until they reached that age.  That meant a required 6:40 am wake-up-and-move-it call for this mother who works the night shift seven days a week.

At the one-third mark in the fall semester, I've been struggling to balance homeschooling the twins during the day with spending quality learning time with Wyatt after school and my nightly teaching load.

The only thing left to give is my sleep.  And so, it gives, and I with it.

Then, Wyatt got sick Wednesday night, he and I up together all night before an hour-long trip into the city this morning to the doctor who logically explained the frequent bathroom trips, the complaints of being too exhausted to walk, and the scary high fever that wouldn't break.

As I navigated early morning traffic, I couldn't help but overhear the backseat teaching lesson Wyatt was giving Emerson.  One minute, he was telling Emerson about being sick, coming into my room last night for me to take his temperature and tuck him back into bed.  The next, he was going off on this long, winding soliloquy explaining who I am.

"You know, mommy works at night so she can stay home during the day and play with us.  Most mommies go to sleep at night like we do and have to go to work during the day, but not ours.  Mommy works on computer with her stoo-dents while we sleep so she can be with us...She doesn't sleep so she's tired. But she's home with us to take care of us..."

I was stunned and instantly left feeling blessed that at almost six years old, he understood, at least in part, some of the sacrifices I make for him and his siblings....and that he even appreciated those choices, how hard I try to be the mother God has called me to be.

It's humbling, for this is always how it is.  When I am at my lowest, my heavenly Father never fails to send someone to lift me up, to confirm the path I'm walking, to encourage me to put another foot forward.

Earlier this week, it was a fellow blogger in my inbox.  Today, it just happened to be the voice of God speaking through the lips of my child.

 

Photo: One uber-strong ant carrying a dead moth to his lair between the bricks.

Sewing Family Seeds of Love

It's hard to remember when my trio left behind being babies and toddlers to become preschoolers and a little boy.  If it weren't for the images in the albums or the videos on my computer, my mind would already have a hard time picturing nearly six years' worth of my children in smaller frames.

In each of those vivid memories, I still can't quite make out how tiny were those toes, how smooth were their downy-skinned faces pressed against mine, how sweet the smell of even their sweaty heads after a hard nap.  I forget what they couldn't do, how simple was their vocabulary, how short their attention span.

In all of those memories, the mind supplants an image of who they were with an image of who they are now. I don't quite understand how this is, how I could remember the overall framework of a memory so precisely yet envision their faces, their abilities so incorrectly.

Perhaps it is the mind's way of protecting us from too much sadness over what is lost and will never be again, a method of deceiving us into contentedness with what is rather than with what was.

If that's the reason, it works.  I enjoy snuggling on the sofa as all three point to their faces and ask questions.  But, I love who my children are now.

As a result, thoughts of intense change are saddening.

Now. The present.

It is good. It is a blessing.

When Wyatt started kindergarten this fall, one of my fears was that we would lose our special time together.  For two years, the twins would nap in the late afternoon, sending our usually carnival-esque house into an odd silence.

It was during those two precious hours that Wyatt had his special one-on-one time with mommy.  He and I would take turns reading to the other, play board games, and learn whatever caught his fancy--counting by fives, telling time, naming dinosaurs.

I feared that with learning all day in kindergarten and coming home to an excited sister and brother who wanted his attention, too, that he would have little time for me in the evenings.

Blessedly, I was wrong.

After-school time with Wyatt is different than it once was, but the "new normal" is just as special.

He still begs to be read to, stacks of books at a time, just like before, only now, the twins join in, able to sit through the stack with him.  While daddy squeezes them together for bedtime reading, our living room sofa isn't big enough, so we four sit together on the floor and giggle in unison at puppy Mudge's antics or Amelia Bedelia's confusion.

Whereas Wyatt used to draw pictures and do crafts at my kitchen table, now he brings those creations home in his back pack (or on his head).  Still, though, each afternoon, the first thing he does is lay them all before me to explain every piece of paper.  I sit attentively through each description, my heart warmed by his interest in sharing with me the pictures of echolocation, Angry Birds, and representations of "five things."

What's more?  Wyatt's being in school has unexpectedly added to our home.  As soon as the bus returns him to me, he is on fire to teach the twins and me what he has learned.

Already this fall, my kitchen has seen a volcano erupt, objects float in salt water to determine density, water frozen into an iceberg, and (as soon as this mom can get herself to Wal-mart--silly mommy, why didn't you know you'd need celery!?) a simple experiment on osmosis.

What he does in class, he wants to do again at home.  The twins love it.  And so do I, this sharing.

On my kitchen cabinet presently sits his written request for a Venus fly trap and a ten-step plan to stop a little girl from chasing him at recess.  It all makes me smile.

Last week, Amelia interrupted Wyatt's after school soliloquy on Legos to have me put an outfit on her doll, and Wyatt burst into tears.  When I finally could get him to put words to his feelings, he quite bluntly told me that the twins had me to themselves all day long, but that this was his time.

I held him like a mama bear, understanding that even with the changes we've undergone around here, time together as a family, time with his mother is still important to him.

In a year, I won't be able to picture his face as it is at this very moment, chin turning from round to square, face becoming more elongated just like his father.  Still, I want to freeze these special moments of happiness.

I want to be able to remind myself when I enter another hard chapter that even when circumstances change, a family love that is cultivated daily runs deep, a family love that demonstrates itself by spending consistent, quality time together will still desire to spend that time together.

The seasons keep on changing.  But they can still be sweet if I am flexible and seek out different times, different ways to demonstrate love.

Writing in Community with Jennifer @ Getting Down With Jesus