Smoke on the Water

I drove past a small lake this morning on the way to the gym. I pass it regularly on the way to and from church, or work, or sometimes when I’m just out driving. Often the water is shrouded in a mist as the chill in the air draws moisture from the lake and creates a hazy blanket of fog that hovers like the breath of God. Every time I’ve driven past and witnessed that beauty I have said to myself, “I should stop and take a picture.” But I never do.

Except today I did. It was especially lovely this morning, maybe because there was the promise of a coming sun, which we hadn’t seen in a few days. Maybe I was just in one of those nature-appreciating moods. I don’t know what was different that made me actually turn the car around and go back to take a photo. I do know that I was disappointed with the result. What was so rich with beauty and delight when seen through organic eyes became flat and lifeless through the lens of my camera. The mundane explanation is that I’m just not a great photographer and my camera wasn’t designed to pick up all the variations in light and color that my living eyes could see.

That’s all true, I suppose, but I suspect something else was missing as well. I looked back and forth between the digital image I had just taken and the scene before, trying to understand what I was missing in the photograph. After a few moments, it dawned on me. The photograph spoke only to the visual sense; all I could do was absorb the beauty by sight and sort of intuit the other emotional contributions made by the rest of my senses. As I stood there, however, looking at the photograph, I was surrounded and engulfed by sensation-causing stimuli. It was a full experience, a lively experience, that the photograph alone could not replicate.

I don’t know how much sense all of that makes to you, but that epiphany led me to another. Most of my life I’ve had only a photographic kind of relationship with God. Stunted, flat, uncompelling—still a beautiful image in its own way, but also lifeless. What God offers is life that is, well, alive. An experience that overwhelms in the best way possible. Christ came, he says, not just to give a picture of life, but a full life, not just a life we can look at and consider with our mind and enjoy in some kind of limited, abstract, unimpactful, way, but a life that surrounds us with the experience of living and, with apologies to John Denver, fills up our senses (John 10:10).

That’s the life I really, really, want. Pretty photographs are fine and all, but I’d rather live the beauty and the joy. How about you? Why not join me, just for today, in being intentional about living the beauty and exploring the overwhelming awesomeness God has bestowed upon us in each day we get to experience.