Summer::July Part 2:beautiful in its time...

[As mentioned in July Part 1, Hurricane Irma has been a major disruption this summer. It's a story for September, but not until I get through July and August in my summer photo series--though I realize that it's technically no longer summer. Looking at the pre-Irma photos of our property is bittersweet. It's hard to see how much was destroyed by the hurricane, but I'm confident that much will also be restored in due time. There will always be beauty--and sometimes it can be found in the most unlikely places.]   

After the beach, the remaining weeks of July showcased our typical mid-summer flare--muscovy ducks gliding across the pond's surface, shimmery-winged dragonflies on barb-wired fences and wildflower blooms. Swallow-tailed kites, pileated woodpeckers, blue jays and mockingbirds...and bushes and bushes and bushes of ripening beautyberries. 

And those air potato vines. I'm well aware that they are an unwelcomed invasive species, but how do I not love those shiny heart-shaped leaves in the thickets along the creek before the air potato beetles do their work. 

Virginia creeper climbs the tall pines, and primrose willow dots the open field and pasture. Resurrection fern, unfurling from its dried spiral with every summer rain, drapes the live oak limbs, as 3 armadillo pups root in the ground underneath. 

And when the goldenrod shoots begin to grow--I'm delighted to remember that there will be not-summer days.    

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

~Ecclesiastes 3:11 

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

~Isaiah 40:8 

Every good and perfect gift::on keeping my motives pure...

When Louis bought an inexpensive digital point and shoot camera, the end of my twenty-three years of homeschooling our children was on the horizon, and the empty nest years were in view. It was Louis' hope that a camera would help me fill the empty places that were sure to come in the days ahead.

Ten years and two cameras later, it seems that Louis' hopes became a reality. Many of my photos have been used by both print magazines and online websites. My friend Robbi and I are working with a designer to prepare our book with over two dozen of my photos for publication. And just this week, I've been ordering prints and considering frame options for four of my photographs that will hang in the hallway of the Hendry County Courthouse.

When an image of a tassel flower {captured with that inexpensive point and shoot camera} opened up on my computer screen and piqued my interest in nature photography those years ago, I had no clue or aspirations for where photography would take me. Clearly an amateur and without photoshop, I never considered a watermark on my photos, and that has not changed.  

Please hear my heart in this. The reasons for my decision to not watermark my photos are a reflection of my relationship with the Father who knows my heart and my needs. They are NOT an indictment against photographers who do, but an example of how God works in our individual lives to conform us to the image of Christ.

This is what the Holy Spirit says to me about my photos:

God is the creator of all that is good and beautiful. I might have an eye for uncovering and framing beauty, but even that is a gift from His hand. A watermark is used to claim ownership, and rightfully so, but I am only a steward of the gift. I'll carry nothing with me into eternity. I'm simply capturing what belongs to the Father.  

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

James 1.17

God is glorified and I'm most satisfied when my needs are met in Him alone. One of the prayers I can count on God answering with a yes every time comes from Psalm 139: 

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! 

God knows my heart and prompts me to check my motives. He knows my longing to be affirmed and noticed by others - to be loved and esteemed for what I do, and a watermark on my photos can be a way for me to say, look at me and what I can do. It isn't that God doesn't want us to encourage and recognize the gifts in others, but that He wants me to not look to and rely on others for that affirmation. He wants me to be completely satisfied by my relationship with Him and affirmed by knowing that I am fully loved - not for what I do, but for who I am in Christ.  

A watermark doesn't add anything of beauty to my photos. In fact, a watermark can be a distraction. If my motives are pure, I don't want those who see my photos to think, oh look - it's Pollywog Creek. I want others to be inspired to worship and be filled with awe and wonder at the power and beauty of our Creator God. 

What about you? Has God ever prevented you from doing something that is perfectly alright for others, but not for you? 

How great the Father's love for us...

My Father and Me
Easter 1950

He's a mess. His six-foot frame stretches gaunt and frail under the hospital bed's starched white sheet, his bare feet sticking out the bottom uncovered. He's badly in need of a shave and long overdue for a hair cut. The tubing that delivers oxygen through prongs in his nostrils has rubbed the skin raw where it drapes over his ears too-large for his face, and the coke-bottle lens of his glasses magnifies the fear in his eyes.

And it breaks my heart.

I'm nearly fifty when Alzheimer's plays tricks with his mind and emphysema clogs his lungs and he tells me he's afraid of the nurses - afraid they'll take his oxygen away or be mean. I help him scoot up in bed, fluff the pillows, tuck in the top sheet to cover his feet and rearrange and loosen the oxygen tubing off the raw creases behind his earlobes, but I can't convince him there's nothing to fear. 

I reach for his hand, squeeze gently, and tell him I love him, and for the first time I can remember, he says he loves me, too.  I wonder if he knows who I am. 

::

I loved my father, and I know he loved me, too - he just never knew how to show it. I was never a daddy's little princess. No bedtime stories, daddy-daughter dates, or the benefit of his counsel about boys or college. I never knew what it meant to be loved and cherished by my father - as a child or an adult.

It's no wonder the confusion of my young adult years as I bounced between the lure of feminism and the unhealthy need for a man's affection. It's only grace that drew me away and grace that protected my heart from sowing bitterness toward the father who'd neglected me when I needed him the most. But the reality is that my experience as an unloved daughter of an earthly father blocked my comprehension of what it means to be a daughter of God - the Most High King - who, as David Platt writes in Follow Me, saturates us as his children with his affection. 

In chapter 5, Platt focuses on what it means for followers of Christ to be the beloved, adopted children of God, and it is balm for the soul of this woman-child of sixty-two who still needs this assurance.

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! I John 3.1

Without question, our status before God was settled at the moment we turned from our sin and ourselves and trusted in Jesus as Savior and Lord. But our lives are based on the love relationship we enjoy and experience every moment of every day as God our Father saturates us as his children with his affection. p.99

I think of my cravings for affection as a young adult when Platt says that the trigger of sin {in Genesis 3} involved the man and and woman looking to the things of this world to satisfy them apart from their Creator, and when Jesus said, I am the bread of life, he was telling the crowds who had gathered to hear him, If you want to be fulfilled, put your faith in me.

I was raised in the church. I knew the Lord's prayer by heart, but the gap I experienced between a distant, unloving earthly father and "Our Father, which art in Heaven" created a craving for affection that I foolishly turned to the world to fulfill and a disconnect to God as father that left me vulnerable to the influence of feminism.

I understand why some women in the church, whose earthly fathers were unable to be the loving fathers God created them to be, struggle to see themselves as beloved daughters, resisting to call God Father and submit to his loving authority and pefect design, but the answer isn't to create a gender-neutral god, but to follow the Jesus of Scripture, to hide under the Father's protective wings, and to allow Him to lavish them with abundant love and heal their wounded hearts.

...amid all these pleasures we are wired to pursue, we must always remember that our deepest craving is not for something but for Someone. p.109

Unfortunately, as Platt states, the pleasures, pursuits, plaudits, and possessions of this world seem far more enticing...and the lives of professing Christians are oftentimes virtually indistinguishable from the lives of non-Christians.

As we begin to comprehend the love of God for His children, we discover that Jesus is the supreme source of satisfaction, and we want nothing apart from him, and as Platt reminds us, we begin to trust Christ to change our affections from the things of this world to Christ alone. It's this change in affections that increases our joy in Him from the inside out and is manifested in our increasing desire for God's Word, communion with Him in prayer, worship, and every other discipline of the faith.

This is the heart of following Jesus: enjoying God as Father through Christ the Son. And when this is a reality in life, then your reason for living is utterly revolutionized. p. 121

Follow Me Discussions at The High Calling

Previous Follow Me Discussion Posts on Pollywog Creek

Introduction - Chapter 3, Captivated by His Greatness - Changed by His Grace

Chapter 4, We Believe Him

Stopping by with a photo or two...

...of a few things lovely {black snake excluded} in my Father's world this week on Pollywog Creek.

The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof,

the world and those who dwell therein...

Psalm 24.1