Photography

Time to get small

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It’s almost the weekend.  Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Some weekends feel like finally setting your foot safely on the shore after swaying, teetering and flailing your way across a rushing river, stepping stone by stepping stone. I am always the one who tends to get distracted by the thought of falling in……losing my balance. Or by thinking about how cold the water is and how fast it’s flying by. Painting all the worst scenarios. I forget how Big God is.

And get overwhelmed with how small I am.

I am a slow learner, but He is patiently teaching me how to take stone by stone, day by day.

He nods and smiles and sometimes shakes His head from the shore. Sometimes He cries with me. And when I, like Peter, forget who He is, He reminds me by reaching an arm out and steadying me on my feet.

Today is the last day of my workweek. It’s the day that ushers in my weekend. I feel the stress receding like the tide, and I’m catching my breath. It’s time for slowing down and getting small enough to let the peace and joy seep back in.

To gaze at the world with eyes of wonder again.

Sometimes, getting small is a very good thing.

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My favorite way of getting small is by going outside and staring up at the sky. When I realize how small I am, it focuses my mind on how big God is. Even the simplest thing such as gazing at the way moss clings to a rock has a way of shrinking my own problems, the ones I think I have anyway, down to size.

When I get small enough, and still enough, I can feel how close He is.

That’s when I can finally let my imagination come out and play. That’s when the magic happens and I begin to wonder things.

Things like how birds can stay on the bough slumbering all night without falling off.  Just once I’d like to be there with them in that deep green of twilight, right after the last bird sings. In that silence when evening falls and night noises rise and the call of the cricket and bullfrog bring it to life.

I wonder how it would be to ride on God’s shoulders during a thunderstorm while He walks among the clouds.

And when it rains like it did last night I will do like I did when I was very small and press my face to the glass and imagine a world parallel to this one where everyone shines, and everyone wears diamonds.

Get small with me?

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? Psalm 8:1-4

 

At close of day

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There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans

forgets his plans, and acts if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has

to speak falls very silent.

And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself:

Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time when the man who prays goes to pray

as if it were the first time in his life

he had ever prayed,

when the man of resolutions puts his

resolutions aside

as if they had all been broken,

and he learns a different wisdom:

Distinguishing the sun from the moon,

the stars from the darkness,

the sea from dry land,

and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.

Thomas Merton

No Man is an Island

Heaven and Earth were finished, down to the last detail. By the seventh day God had finished his work. On the seventh day he rested from all his work. God blessed the seventh day. He made it a Holy Day because on that day he rested from his work, all the creating God had done. This is the story of how it all started, of Heaven and Earth when they were created. Genesis 2:2-4

The Woodpile

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It was just a little place to store wood.

It looked harmless enough, and yet when I saw it things tumbled out of my heart that I didn’t know were there.

There was the promise of the first snap of fall and the times when the leaves start floating down,

back down to rejoin the earth.

There were long nights by the fire, and conversations by the glow of embers burning low.

It was celebrations toasted and ending and new beginnings.

And all in that little stack of wood.

I saw snow falling, heard rain pelt on the window and moaning winds and creaking branches scraping on windows.

Times when it’s so cold that only your nose is peaking out of the covers.

It is camping and sadness and times that will never come again. It was remembering the time my Dad and I stacked wood and what a good time working together we had.

And how long ago that was now.

It was prying a lid of emotions that I try to keep neat and stacked just like that wood.

Somehow that little woodpile makes me wonder just how much the human heart can hold without spilling over.

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The Snow Day

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Tuesday night my little corner of the desert took a cue from the rest of the country and got uncharacteristically cold and gray. When dawn drew aside her curtain we were treated to a view that was almost Holy.

Snow had dusted the top of the Superstition Mountains…..and all day long my camera beckoned from its place on the shelf.

I needed to get closer to that view…..closer to God. I drove through rain-soaked drizzle and felt the snap in the air as I waited for the heater to kick in.

My spirit was bogged down with an anchor that held my heart fast, kept it from sailing free.

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And in this life isn’t there almost always a pain, a heartache, an issue, “a thing” to weigh down our hearts?  But I have learned one very important bit of wisdom in my time on this earth.

Really, you could say that it is one of the most important lessons to learn.

God is always there too, and He’s always bigger than the thing, whatever that thing  is.

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Sometimes, we just need to know that He remembers us down here; that’s how I found myself praying that day, as I drove.

Remember me Lord…….remember me as You remembered Noah, Moses and Abraham.

See this woman down here; this woman driving around getting lost looking for the perfect view of the mountain, the perfect view of You. One who worries about her family. Remember me as my pain blooms to life once again by something I see that reminds me of what used to be.

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And then somehow, a miracle does happen because it’s not only God remembering me, but me remembering God, and all the big things He’s brought us through before and I know He will again.

On days when we’d rather throw the covers over our head, what we need to do is swing our feet over the side of the bed and ask God what kind of miracle you and He are going to pull off together. It’s what I had to do this morning……

I remember You, God. And today I will set my sights on Heaven.

Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand. Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory. Colossians 3:1-4