Reflectional

 No photo this time....what! You always have a photo? As this post is lacking direction, so is my mind currently. There's so much stuff going on right now that a battle for control is waging a war in my mind. Work has turned itself upside down as my boss has up and quit as of next week. I'm headed for a cruise next week also which leaves my co-worker by herself. My house is torn apart as we continue to remodel it by ourselves, very slow progress indeed. December was a blur as I was either injured or with a cold. January is looking like a blur and I have not shot one good photo in months. Work is chaotic, home is chaotic and all I want to do is run away and take photos. I hope and pray that this upcoming vacation can reset me and give me some much needed time to reflect, focus and breathe. 

It's colder than cold outside so I can't go out and enjoy the outdoors. My living room is now a disaster as the floor is being replaced and everything is changing at work and I am a person that likes a statis quo. I hate change and I don't think it is a conscious thing, it's deeper than that. It's like having something rubbing you the wrong way. Eventually if the rubbing persists it creates a blister. I'm starting to feel like a blister is forming in my head. I just can't deal. When I can't deal, I'm like an overloaded circuit and I blow a fuse, which is me withdrawing into myself more and being less functional. 

I don't like that side of me very much either. I don't like that depression side where doubt and loathing take over. I have been in those states before where it takes months for me to come out of them and I don't particularly want to go back. It's a very dark pit of despair. I learned several years ago that God loves me. Now I have been a Christian for near twenty years but it took me around ten to fifteen of those years for me to realize in my heart that God loves me.

We can read it all we want and we can hear it all we want but to really understand it and to grasp it in your heart is a much different thing. Head knowledge is learning, repeating and writing it down. It's what gets us through twelve years of school. Learn the stuff, repeat the stuff and take a test to see if you remember the stuff. However, one in a few dozen children that learn the stuff want to actually pursue more knowledge which leads them to understanding and eventually a career. 

See, we can know God loves us and if you ask a Christian if God loves them most will say yes. They even do you one further and quote "God so loved the world...."   Who's not heard that. However, repeating words and what I like to call head knowledge gets you nothing in life. Take a straight A student right out of High School and place them in a career atmosphere and what do you get. A person completely lost. Why? Because school teaches us how to pass tests. We learn for a week, take a test on Monday then move on to something else. It doesn't change anything in us if we don't get some desire and passion in it. 

When I went to school, I learned from teachers who were passionate about the subject they taught. If they went off book and spent an extra day diving deep into the subject and presenting the materials from different perspectives then I became engaged and wanted to learn more. Head knowledge doesn't make change, passion and desire do. If I was a non-Christian and I had two people approach me, one handed me a card with Jesus loves you on it with a bunch of quotes and the other asked how I was and invested some time and energy into me, which one do you think has my attention. Of course the second one. 

I found out God loved me because the passion and desire I had for Him, the pursuit I had for Him gave Him the ability to open up to me and for Him to leap from my head to my heart. I can't create moments of clarity for myself, only the Holy Spirit can do that but once it is done, it's done. I can't go back. With those dark times I used to have, it was before I had the understanding of God's love for me. Even now, a bit lost and confused about directions and life, I see clearly God's love for me. 

Why do you think it says, My people perish for lack of understanding. He's not talking about knowledge, He's talking about understanding which is a migration from the head to the heart and no matter how much you study, read, hear or see, only God can make it real in your heart. He only makes it real to those who desire and pursue His heart. 

I think I have rambled on enough. I've covered this before but sometimes I need to hear it. Maybe someone out there needs to hear it. Who knows. All I know is that I need Him.

To God be the Glory always!

Imagination

It's an intriguing photo. Questions like, where was this taken, what kind of building was it, all enter my mind when I first look at it. I took the thing and it makes me wonder. It's a photo of an abandoned building in Chattanooga TN and there's a greenway right beside it. As I was biking through the area, I had to stop to take some photos of its unique shapes, designs and colors. This reminds me of the colorful houses in the Hispanic cities around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The rustic but almost livable vibe you get from this is totally deceiving. It is definitely not livable, yet the camera can capture such a narrow window to fool the mind into painting the rest beyond the pixels we see here. It may be a house along the shores of the northeast coast, a lighthouse perhaps. It could be a run down shack with multiple generations of family living in it. It could be any building with countless locations. See the trick is to remove those things recognizable in order to free up the imagination. If you took a wide angle shot of Big Ben in London, because it is iconic and billions of photos have been taken, the imagination is completely disengaged. However, you take a picture of a portion of the clock face, then suddenly it could be any clock face from around the world. Then the viewer takes themselves on a trip around the world trying to figure out, which clock is this. 

So, when taking photos, try to be a bit mysterious and hide the subjects true origin. It'll open up so much dialog between the viewers and the one who took the photo. 

With Winter fully engaged where I live, it's been a bit of a photography slump. If it's not raining, then it's too cold to go out. Not to mention the sun goes down shortly after I get off of work. So, new photos for me are a rare thing. However, a trip to the Caribbean on a cruise is upcoming and I plan on doing a lot of photography. So, upcoming posts here we come.

As with most of my posts, I reread them over and over, edit, read, edit, and then finally publish. To say I am a little OCD about my writing is an understatement. As I was in that process I thought of a spiritual principle to go with the above text.

If we take a global approach to God and Christ, we can often collect every one else's already established ideas, religiousness, and perspectives and adopt them as our own. Like my description of Big Ben or a picture of every famous spot on Earth, it becomes so overly photographed that the place loses its identity and special meaning. If we adopt a religious, church, law inspired, scripture lead, mass induced worship driven relationship with Jesus, we've missed the opportunity to become personally involved with knowing Him. 

The idea of taking just a section of wall was for the viewer to fill in the rest with their imagination. Like a relationship with Jesus, we must get the foundation set in historical accuracy and spiritual significance of His coming and dying but we should stop there with the overexposure to everyone's opinions and ideas and let us fill in the rest of the picture with direct understandings from Jesus Himself. 

If we are spoon-fed our entire lives we never learn how to do it ourselves. We become complacent and completely reliant on the person feeding us. They could feed us poison and we'd be helpless to do much about it.

However, if we use the source, Jesus Himself as our guide, then we cannot be led astray. Such as my picture above gives you a basis for your imagination, so too does Jesus act as the source of your imagination. He will paint the picture beyond the borders of what we initially see. He will create in us and fulfill in us the correct perspective which is the perspective of the Father. 

It says, My people perish for lack of understanding. 

So seak His understanding by spending time with Him and empty out your preconceptions and religious traditions. Let Him fill in the rest of the picture for you.

To God be the Glory