Still Saturday::remember that we are not worthy...

You and I love not because we find worthy objects to love. Remember the cross!

Remember that we are not worthy. We are jerks, terse and stubborn people. We do not deserve God's love, and yet he provided it for us. 

Salvation's beauty comes by way of sacrificial love---a love that gives itself up for the unlovable. And that bloody love gave us life. It should be our joy to mime this kind of love. 

Today, you and I have the opportunity to bring life to others by way of our sacrificial love. 

Are you bringing heaven with you into your relationships? 

Willard, Timothy (2014-10-14). Longing for More: Daily Reflections on Finding God in the Rhythms of Life (p. 27). Baker Publishing Group. 

See the angels?

We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

~ Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water, p.10

Can a sixty-something wannabe psalmist with a camera be an artist? I consider the question often - my nose buried in a growing stack of books for artistic encouragement and enlightenment. 

Most kindergartners have drawing and painting skills more advanced than mine, my family begs me not to sing, and though I once dreamed of being a concert pianist, I never possessed the skills to play beyond my living room.

Yet, there's something about how I see through the lens of a camera that captures wonder and frames beauty - or so I'm told, even if my adult children do roll their eyes. So I keep asking the question - looking for answers, for light in the words of honest-to-goodness artists, like Madeleine L'Engle and Makoto Fujimura. 

That's when I read L'Engle's quote about angels. She's right, I think - or so my experiences tell me. Experiences like the one that begins with these excerpts from a *short story I wrote two years ago:

We found Daddy asleep, slumped to one side of his wheelchair in the hall outside his room. He was a mess. In desperate need of a haircut and shave, his rumpled clothes hung loosely on his tall, bony frame. Both arms were covered with bruises and a bandage was wrapped around his right forearm. He’d bitten into one of his medications and the reddish-brown remains mixed with drool ran down the creases of his chin.

Waking him gently, I wheeled him back to his room, washed his face and showed him the bag of Christmas decorations we brought to decorate his side of the room. I removed the decorations from the bag and placed them on Daddy’s bed. His bed, a bedside table, a small closet of drab, baggy clothes, and his wheelchair were all he had to show for the years he had worked—long past retirement age—to provide for his family. 

I’d never known Daddy to be anything but gentle except for the time he punched mother’s roommate when she wouldn’t let him through the door to see his wife. It was totally out of character for him to destroy the Christmas tree I put it on the table next to him. 

“Daddy! Why did you do that?” I cried, prying his fingers off the now ruined centerpiece, but he only groaned and stared over my shoulder. 

I called for the nurses. Though they didn’t want to, I convinced them to put Daddy back in bed. “Maybe he just needs to rest,” I told them as they removed his shoes and tucked the covers around his frail, lanky frame. 

* * * 

It was the worst Christmas ever. Without waking up again, Daddy died two days after we left him that day, and mother forgot how to brush her teeth. 

Daddy was admitted to the hospital the night after I left him to rest. I was by his side, with my nephew Michael, as he took his last breath. When Michael told the rest of the family in the waiting room, his 4 year old daughter asked, "Did you see the angels?"


Mason and Gavin were only 3 years old the day I took this photo while they played outside. All week, Gavin talked about seeing angels. Lots of them. Everywhere. And he was serious. "See the angels?" he asked Mason, pointing up into the cloudless blue sky. "They are all over!"

I'm pretty sure I've seen angel wings in some of the photos I've downloaded from my camera.

Maybe I am an artist - and one who's not so old after all.

{*The Worst Christmas Ever was published in the anthology Show Off, compiled and edited by Joe Bunting, writer and creator of the award-winning The Write Practice.}

For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.

Psalm 91.11

I {LOVE} Sunday::For how great is his goodness...

On that day the Lord their God will save them,
as the flock of his people;
for like the jewels of a crown
they shall shine on his land.
For how great is his goodness,
and how great his beauty!

Zechariah 9.16,17

Let the earth rejoice...

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it!
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the Lord, for he comes,
for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness,
and the peoples in his faithfulness. Psalm 96.11-13

The sun peeks in glorious amber streaks between layers of dark clouds as it rises in the east, and I am awestruck at the contrast. My camera at home, I temporarily mourn my inability to capture the moment - a gift, perhaps, that I might give my full attention to wonder. Does not the light of God's presence shine brighter and more vivid when it breaks through storm clouds of circumstance?

I tell my husband that I’m a photographer that I might capture these glimpses of glory in nature to remember when I struggle to see past pain and suffering, but it's the uncovering of God’s fingerprints in the least likeliest places that motivates my photography most.

We, you and I, declare something good and beautiful because it fulfills our needs and desires, but this world was created by God for His glory and pleasure, and He already declared it good. Is it not possible that the wildflower seeds blown by the wind to grow in places we will never see were created for God's praise and pleasure alone?

We long to leave home so we can delight in majestic mountains, foreign wonders, and the sun's splendor as it rises and sets over the sea's vast horizon, but like sunlight breaking through dark clouds, maybe we're overlooking the fingerprints of God and the brightest and most vivid glimpses of his glory in nature in the ditches and dark places right where we live.

Somebody has to live here, it may as well be me...

There's a story to tell about that bull who wandered through Pollywog Creek yesterday, but I'm saving it for next week. Rural life may move slowly, but it's seldom boring. 

There's an azalea story for next week, too, but for now we're headed through the Everglades for Everglades City and the promise of seafood and a detour through Ave Maria on the way home. 

Just thought I'd stop in with a few photos of life this week on the creek, and to encourage you to click on over {for some weekend inspiration} to Sandy's for Still Saturday and Deidra's for The Sunday Community.  And Ann's, of course, for daily whispers of grace.  

You'll never be a beauty queen...

I'm ten or eleven and I limp down the darkened stairwell. At the bottom of the marble stairs, mama opens the door and exhaust fumes from the street outside fill the hallway, stifling the stench of burned flesh and antiseptics lingering in my nostrils.

Outside we cross the street to McCory's. It's my reward for not crying when the doctor cauterizes the warts on my knee for what seems like the hundredth time. I climb up onto one of the red vinyl-covered stools along the counter, and mama buys us cherry cokes with the two last dimes in her wallet.

Mama examines the burns on my knee and shakes her head. You'll never be a beauty queen she tells me, and don't I know it. Frizzy hair frames my freckled face, drab brown eyes and buck-toothed grin.

She means no harm. She's hoping to make me laugh, but the words stick tight to my tender heart and when I look in the mirror, I see ugly and loser. And I don't remember my daddy ever telling me otherwise.

When you are ten or eleven and believe you're ugly and a loser and no one tells you differently, and you drag those wounding words into grown-up life, it takes a God-sized scalpel to scrape them off your heart, mercy to bathe the wounds in love, and the cross to heal them with grace.   

So when I'm long past ten or eleven and once again limp down the stairs, I begin to understand why I see beauty in the weeds.

He has made everything beautiful in its time....
Ecclesiastes 3:11a ESV

I wonder...

In our Pollywog Creek pasture, black-eyed susans dance on tall slender stems to early summer's warm breezes, while clumps of common tickseed and tiny southern fleabane push through the sandy ground along rusty fences and fill the shallow ditches by the road. 

They're common weeds, and come rainy season and the grass grows too tall, they'll be mowed over...and if I didn't have a camera, I'd hardly notice or care.

It's through the lens of the camera that I see beauty in the ordinary - the common weed - and the unmistakable fingerprints of an orderly, powerful Creator. 

And it makes me wonder what beauty I miss in the ordinary lives around me - image-bearers growing in the dry places of every-day life in the trenches.  

Lord, open my eyes to the wonder and beauty in every person you bring into my life this day.

Pity the heart that can't see it...

A couple of weeks ago I left a comment for Emily (@imperfect prose) that has been resonating in my own heart since...

Dandelions are so much more than weeds. In fact, I don't think they are weeds at all...they just keep popping up where they aren't invited {the definition of a weed, of course}, but what promise they hold packed with all those seeds...and a determination to offer beauty, even if it isn't wanted. Pity the heart who can't see it.

"Pity the heart that can't see it," I tell Emily. "But isn't that my own heart at times?" I wonder - when the "dandelions" of  interruptions and unscheduled events keep "popping up where they aren't invited" and determine to derail my plans, and I grumble and complain and fail to see that they are coming from the hand of God.

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day. ~ C.S. Lewis

What I call "weeds", God calls "dandelions", and pity my heart when I fail to see it. 

{Photo} Artsy dandelions 'round the pond - experimenting with the ISO setting in manual on my Nikon for a High Calling Focus challenge last spring.

Engaging with Creation...

"In order to glimpse the glory of God
where he hides himself in creation
we actually have to engage with creation."
Bill Walsh

Outside the front door...









Under the live oak trees...










Leaning against a tall pine...










Through the pasture...












Out in the open fields...











Into the backyard...

Straightening the welcome mat and pouring tall glasses of sweet iced tea—with special greetings to those finding their way here thanks to Women of Faith and Patsy's Porch.

Grateful for an unseasonably cool June morning, I slipped on old ballet shoes (quiet shoes, remember), grabbed my camera, and wandered about our few Pollywog Creek acres.

Visitors to our property must wonder what I see worthy of a camera. The colorful glories of spring faded long ago in summer's harsh rays, and the landscaping around our modest home is in great need of attention.

Wildflowers in the fields and pasture struggle to break through the drought-dry topsoil only to wilt lifeless—thirsty and parched.

Rusty fencing needs repair, the creek is barely a trickle, and the neighbor's shed—one side supported by an old toilet—spoils the view across the nearly dried-up pond to the south.

No, it's not the place I'd choose to visit for photographs these days, but it's what God has given me. It's a slice of the world that He has created, and everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.

So I receive this brittle-dry ground and the unsightly views beyond its fences with much thanksgiving; and I grab my camera, and I ask God to show me glimpses of His glory, the work of His hands, and He never fails to do so.

And as these photos prove, not every photo is stunning or even noteworthy, but that's not the point. The camera is both the brush with which I paint and the tool God uses to open my eyes to the beauty at my feet. It's like Patsy said, "educate your eye". It's how I am cultivating an eye for life's mercies while I wander through the thorns and weeds of life.

What about you? How and where are you seeing the hidden glimpses of God's glory in Creation?