Detroit, MI

Norfolk airport with morning coffee in hand, unceremoniously tossed in the trashcan: a last sip of home before two flights, soaring through a garden of clouds, the Sears Tower & Great Lakes dwarfed from above, and a frenzy of (belligerent) Detroit drivers, a wedding to chronicle with the only thing I brought with me besides two sweaters and Harry Potter: a camera.
Photography requires active observation. You have to see things not just as they are, but how
they could be.



A scary task before me: to commemorate the union of two lovers' separate lives: their marriage.
I have no education when it comes to holding the camera. I am comfortable teaching English; I've a Master's degree in this field. I am comfortable with nouns and adverbs and commas and semicolons. I know the technicalities of my language. I know criticism & theories. When it comes to the camera, I don't even know the rules. I've tried to learn them, but they elude me. Maybe one day I'll understand, but maybe there is a freedom in not knowing, a learning to love the questions.


I dropped a camera two Octobers ago, dashing it to bits. I received a new camera for Christmas, a camera capturing colors & grace the beauty of things. I didn't know I could do that. Taking pictures became a therapeutic escape from reading & books & academia. Thus, I didn't want to learn the rules, the technicalities. I just wanted to see the world around me differently, capturing the bits of beauty God in His graciousness provided along my path.
Now, in July, a call to create not just for me but for others: a call to photograph a wedding. A beautiful church, enough light but dark, orange tinged walls, and blue, purple, green, yellow, pink, brilliant stained-glass. Candles glow and guests gather. I gulp; this sanctuary is big and I don't know where to stand. I should know the light but I don't. I should know how to pose people but I don't. All I've got is reliance on God to see what I need and a finger to press a shutter button.
Reliance on God through travel & doing something out of your comfort zone is rest and vitality eclipsing fear. Do not let fear shape who you become. Set the following statement on repeat and hope it seeps into the brain. Clicking the shutter brings comfort when fear invades. God has not given us a spirit of timidity. His plan was in place long before I gave it a thought; He taught me it's okay to fall away from my own plan & trust the one eternally engraved by Omniscience.
Back home, looking at the lessons He taught this weekend. I sit back and think about the airport and the rental car and the wedding and Detroit: a beautiful weekend of trust & obedience, the warmth of others, gratitude and patience, provision and prayer. Not just "Dear God let me have this; let me be safe" praying. A deep abiding prayer to the One who wrote even this journey into my book to let be what is, and to accept help from He who willingly gives it, and to accept help from strangers who also can give. I pray to give in the manner in which I have been given, and this weekend was a blessing and a chance to overcome the choking fear that holds us back.