Living in a Wide Open Aperture World + Part 3 of Faith Through the Lens

Spoiler - maybe "wide-open aperture living" isn't ideal...

So yesterday was part three of the message series called “Faith Through the Lens” that I’ve been sharing at the congregation I serve as pastor. First week centered on Focus and Framing, second week was the shutter, and this week was the aperture. Each was tied to spiritual learnings I’ve experienced connected to the practice of photography. Here’s the link for week 3’s message if you want to take it in. One note about the recording - my voice is really off because I was on the upswing from a short bout with Covid but it really took my voice more than anything else.

Week 3 - Faith Through the Lens - Aperture

Anyway - I’ve been thinking about the whole “wide-open aperture” living as a result of the message and it connected to something that Substack put up for folks called “Substack Summer.” Basically, it was a record of how many different substacks, posts, and words read during the summer. (Side note - I guess I need to read the user agreement a bit better - substack recording LITERALLY everything I read…sigh). Here’s what mine looked like.¹

What really stood out to me was 981,142 words. The average page on a printed book has 250 words which means that I read the equivalent of 3,924 pages on substack sites alone!!!! One of the longest novels I’ve read is The Stand by Stephen King which chimes in around 1,200 pages. So that means this summer, on substack alone I read the equivalent of The Stand three times over! Hey, one time through per month!

But how much do I remember of all that I took in? I remember some of it, I saved some, I quoted a bunch. But truly how much of that settled in to me? Not 3,924 pages and 981,142 words.

Add to that the fact that I read 6 other books this summer, watched shows with my wife, and likely read a lot of other words online.

That is what I mean by wide-aperture living.

Right now, we have so much around us, so much we can choose to take in, so much we may think we NEED to take in and what ends up happening is that, like photography with a wide open aperture, we either are left with everything overexposed and we don’t see ANYTHING or we end up with such a shallow depth that only a few things are clear and the rest is fuzzy. Like this photo of Scout which was crafted with a wide-open aperture and the only thing really in focus is her snoot.

Photography with a wide-open aperture often results in a very shallow depth of field which is great for something like portraits where you want the subject in sharp focus but the rest to not take away from the central subject. But I am not sure that wide-open aperture living is the way to go.

A friend of mine shared a sermon this past week (on her substack which were part of those 981,000+ words) on the teaching of Jesus from John 15 about being rooted in Jesus. Roots are sunk down deep and grow slowly. They don’t spread quickly but take time and patience to get established. But when they do…they’re hard to uproot. But it isn’t just in a Christian way of life that this is a reality, but I think in the whole of our lives. I don’t think we were meant to take in as much as we try to take in. It overwhelms our systems and it is harder and harder to focus.

I would love to write here and say that I am going to make this massive change in what I do, but probably not fully. Enneagram 5 here is the type that wants to take in all kinds of information (the observer, investigator, etc) but maybe I can be more judicious about what I take in. Maybe read things over multiple times rather than getting through one, moving to the next, and the next and the next and then forgetting what was in the first two.

Wide open aperture - works great for photography, but not always for life.

Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed

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1. Full disclosure, I honestly thought to myself when I saw this…If I had known I was at 997 posts read, I would have read three more to get to 1,000…sigh