A Preface - Six Words
Thank you once again for being a subscriber to my humble little site here. I am grateful for the trust you have placed in me in what I have shared and I hope and pray that what I share continues to speak in and to you.
One of my goals for 2023 is to spend some more intentional time writing some form of a book around my experience with photography and faith and some of what I have learned and taught about how to put that into practice. To this point I have an introduction written and then an outline of what would follow along with a bunch of notes and quotes and ideas. So as we start the new year, I wanted to share the introduction as it stands right now that goes a bit into how all this started to come together several years ago. I would welcome comments and thoughts on it or any other ideas that you might have. There hasn’t been a great deal of editing done on this. I tend to be a train-of-thought writer and grammar isn’t always my strong suit. (My wife would attest to that when she was reading my Doctorate of Ministry dissertation in 2007). So, without further ado…The link below is a PDF and then I have also copied the full text below it along with the photo that connects to the story.
An Introduction - Six Words (PDF Copy)
Six Words
“You need to pray the Psalms”
Just six words. Six words shared over lunch in a noisy chicken restaurant In January of 2014. Six words that I nodded at when they were shared but didn’t have much intention to listen to. Six words that my friend reminded me of that night when he called to see if I had indeed started to pray the Psalms. Six words that eventually would begin a radical transformation in my life.
I’ll come back to those six words in a bit. But what was going on at that time for me that led my friend to share those six words?
To do that, I need to go back a few months to November of 2013. I was attending an event in Davidson, North Carolina for pastors who were dealing with “stuff.” One of the evenings, I had gone out by myself to Lake Norman to reflect, to pray, to be outside of the pleasant yet rather sterile walls of my room at the Fairfield Inn. There wasn’t anything that stood out to be different that night as I walked along a shoreline path but there was something stirring. As the sun began to set, I had what I can only describe as beginning to walk on holy ground.
As the sun set, the waning light illuminated an east-to-west bank of clouds with a deep red hue. This bank seemed to stretch through the sky with one point ending beyond the horizon with the rest widening out towards those of us taking in this breathtaking moment of beauty. Not thinking a lot about it other than “wow, that’s pretty,” I took a few pictures and went to say something about it out loud to myself.
However as I started to speak I found that the only thing that I could verbalize at that moment and could even think at that moment was a single word…“Glory.”
Glory.
Glory.
I’d had moments in the past where I felt like I had encountered the reality of God in tangible ways but nothing like what started to grow as I found that I had lost my voice save for that one word.
Glory.
What was stirring at that moment both scared and filled me. As one who had always sought to keep myself “in check,” I found myself in a place where I had seemingly lost control.
At one point, my wife called to check in with me and when I went to answer the phone, I couldn’t say anything. (Strangely enough, I was able to send her a text after I hung up letting her know that I was ok and something amazing was happening - I am grateful for this little bit of family-saving grace as I didn’t want Amy calling the local police to find out what was happening to her husband). I continued to take in this sunset and to walk around the path still saying “glory” over and over. It felt like no time passed at all and it felt like time had stopped. I know sunsets generally aren’t much longer one night to the next but this one felt like it was the longest I had ever taken in.
Eventually the sun did set and a crescent moon took its place in the sky. My voice returned and I returned to the hotel and began to try to make sense of what had transpired. Now, a burning bush didn’t appear and tell me to take off my Tevas but that was truly holy ground that night and there was color like fire in the sky that revealed something of God far bigger than I had experienced before.
Back to the six words spoken a few months later in that chicken restaurant.
We finished lunch and headed back to what we each had the rest of our days. I didn’t think much of it until about 930 that night when my friend sent me a text…
“Did you pray Psalm 1?”
Oops.
So that I could reply to him with full honesty, I opened up my Bible app and read Psalm 1 and sent a message back, “Yes I did.”
The reply came back.
“Good, do it again tomorrow.”
After that last reply, though, I felt like I needed to go back to Psalm 1 and read it again instead of the hurried, just-get-it-done read that I did initially.
Verse 1…Happy are those… Honestly I hadn’t felt truly happy in a long time. For much of the preceding three years and likely longer, I had been struggling with depression and anxiety which over several lengthy periods had become acute. My struggles with these “demons” had affected everyone in my life - my wife (she lost a role in one of her jobs because of how much she had to cover for me), my children (I remember an afternoon where I had a sudden anxiety attack and could barely control myself to breathe and I just yelled at them to go outside), my personal health (I was eating my stress and my fears), and my role as a pastor. In fact, the reason that my friend shared those six words was because I had told the group that several people at the church I served were working to try to force me out of my role as the lead pastor and I didn’t know what was to happen…
Happy are those…what does happy even feel like?
Verse 2…their delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law they meditate day and night…delight? Same thing as happy - hadn’t felt much of that. Meditate day and night? Sure, I read my Bible in the morning most days but do I really meditate on it, dwell on it, let it really soak into me and my life? Not so much. I barely had the energy to just read the Bible enough to craft some semblance of a sermon for the Sunday upcoming.
I thought to myself, “this is going well so far.”
Verse 3…they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper….now, that’s sounding pretty good. That’s sounding like something I can visualize and imagine.
What came to my heart and mind was not some fictional imaginative place but instead a real life place I had visited many times over. Standing on the wooden boardwalk at Rowe Woods in Milford, Ohio, looking out at a tree growing out of the waters of Crosley Lake that surround it.1 What would it be like to be so filled and so fed like that tree?
So I began to write in an unused journal that I found on one of our bookcases. I didn’t write much but it was a start of what was to come. I printed out a picture I had taken of that tree and taped onto that same page. And I saw at that moment, the tiniest glimpse into what praying the Psalms was going to do in me. But I had no idea the breadth of what was to come as I began to explore Scripture, faith, the world, my life, my calling through the lens of my camera. I had no idea how my way of seeing would be forever changed. I had no idea the healing that would come as I began to understand the power of beauty, wonder, awe, and gratitude. I had no idea that the experience on the shores of Lake Norman would be a stepping stone into seeking the everyday glory of God all around us.
All from six words spoken over lunch in a noisy chicken restaurant.
Quick side note - I told this story to someone at Rowe Woods a few years later and she shared with me that the tree is actually dead but it would be too difficult to try to take it out. #buzzkill