Expansive - A Picture is Worth...
Plus the next Pop Culture Pastors' Hour coming up!
First off,
and I will be live-videoing our next Pop Culture Pastors’ Hour this Monday at 11:30am ET. We will be talking about a movie that feels like it might become another Shawshank Redemption type film that doesn’t go great at the box office but is a truly transcendent story. It is called The Life of Chuck. It is a film that is really hard to say much about without spoiling the amazingness of this film but it has an incredible cast - Tom Hiddleston, Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mia Sara1, Mark Hamill, and Carl Lumbly - and an even more beautiful story If you want to watch it, please please please just go into it without any spoilers. You’ll be grateful you did. And btw, it falls big time into this expansiveness thing I’ve got going on.You can stream it at home at any of the links in the footnote below.2
Ok - onto the rest…
So I have like six partly written posts and not one of them feels like something to share. So let’s just go with the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m still very much on this sense around expansiveness and that has influenced everything from what I am seeing and photographing to a Bible study I’m crafting for the new congregation I’m serving to a new ultra-wide angle lens that I purchased a few days ago with the gift card my previous congregation gave as a part of their thank you. So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then this post is like 11,000 words...
These next two are using my new lens (thank you Christ Church!!!) - You may recognize the bench (the one that was the focus of my book Ordinary BenchMarks: Finding Meaning in the Everyday). The first is framed (18mm) exactly like those in the book using the new lens. But the second is zoomed out using the same lens at 10mm. It is a far more expansive image. I love it.
Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed
PS - Scout photographed with the new lens!
I will say one spoiler type thing here - Mia Sara played Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). In this film she plays a character’s grandmother. Dang, I’m old.
AppleTV |. Amazon Prime | YouTube - All are $9.99 to rent, $19.99 to buy
My tiny life happens inside my little, rented house and then inside of me like one of those Russian Nesting Dolls. Yep. My life is part of a much larger story but I don't know what that larger story is supposed to be about - yet. I am a work-in-progress. Disorder more than Reorder as Richard Rohr would say.
Nesting Dolls are stiffly expandable and they hide untried ideas. If a new idea is hiding in the medium, considerably-sized doll, for example, listening to Al Jazeera instead of MSNBC, I have to wait until the larger figure that encloses it is opened because there are little, mischievous keys hidden inside the larger doll that make it easier to open the Al Jazeera figure. It’s curiosity that urges me to follow the clues. Curiosity expands us and is as important to the soul as it is to thought.
So, I tuned in Al Jazeera. It will take me a little while to get used to hearing a British accent because that’s another one of those mischievous keys. Remembering that Shakespeare sounded like that makes the news much more romantic and listenable.
Your photos are always worth a thousand words, friend.