We watched a photography lecture last night, in which the instructor told us there were three important elements in an iconic photograph: great light, good composition, and an interesting subject. To put these together in a photograph, he told us, you have to learn to see.
This is what it means to be a writer, too. The subject has to be interesting; you have to have something to say. The composition or structure must be sound, fitting to the subject, creative, not distracting from what you are trying to say. And light -- what is a writer's equivalent to light? It is that which enables us to see, and the way it falls on our subject affects how we see it, and determines the voice with which we tell our story. The dawn of a new day allows for one kind of vision; midnight starlight quite another. In the bright and busy light of noon all is visible, but distraction abounds; twilight cloaks many details in shadow, narrowing our focus.
The photographer and the writer both find their best fodder not when they travel to exotic destinations and participate in extreme adventures, but when they learn to see what is going on in the every day. Each time the sun rises, there is something unique and fresh about the way its light falls on the earth; this is what makes art, what makes what I see different from what everyone else has seen, what gives me something to say.
Each morning when I am running in the woods and I round the corner into the clearing and climb to the rise where I can look past the forest to the west, I am eager to see what is there. Is the moon being swallowed up by the mountains? Is Seattle gleaming like the celestial city, throwing back the rays of the rising sun? Are the mountains blushing rosy under the steadfast gaze of the sun, who is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion? Are the clouds tucked in close and grey over the mountain range, or hanging low and fleecy white in the valley? What colors and clouds are painted on the living canvas of sky, sometimes displayed only for the blink of an eye? Like the mercy of God that is new every morning, so there is something new for our eyes to take in with each new day.
I wonder if this is part of what it means to live in hope. Paul says "the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed," which says to me that these sons have not been revealed yet, that there is something yet coming, something to wait for. Paul also tells us that God "chose us in [Jesus] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.... In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding." We are already chosen, redeemed, lavished upon. Yet still we wait.
The cycles of waiting and fulfillment that we live with on earth -- waiting for sunrise, for the birth of a child, for the coming of a desired event -- echo the way we wait for perfection as God's children.
The fulfillment we receive now, the mercy that is new every morning, is a foretaste of the time when all the promises will be completely fulfilled.
So I will wait in eager expectation for that final day, and in the meantime I will keep looking for pictures to take, for stories to tell, for the new way that light dawns each morning.
"O Israel, put your hope in the LORD, both now and forever." Now, today, even while I am waiting. Forever, when that hope will be sated.
Scriptures from Romans 8, Ephesians 1, & Psalm 131
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