LISA AND TIM

I love it when friends get engaged. I also love it when I get to photograph them! :) Because I seriously have some of the most good looking friends ever. Check these two out! :)

THE TWOMEYS

When I was in Calliope a little while ago I got to meet and photograph my friend Courtney's boyfriend's family. It was such a fun shoot as you can see from all the laughing!

SUNSETS

This is my view when I make dinner at my new job. It's a bit hard to take ;)

I could never get tired of sunsets. They're never the same twice.

LEAVES

This post is just some random thoughts I've been having lately and has been sitting in my drafts for a while now, so I thought I may as well go ahead and post it :) Hope it makes some kind of sense.


***

I photograph a lot of leaves. A leaf on a rock, a leaf on the ground, a leaf on a tree, holding a leaf, etc. I love leaves. One particular photo recently caught my eye and a thought popped into my head. "God made that leaf."

It's so simple, and most people already know that, but what struck me was that God made THAT leaf. That particular leaf, that chose to fall from a particular tree that was planted by a particular seed in a particular season by a particular gardener. And that seed came from another tree, and so the history goes on and on.

So when I saw that particular leaf and thought about the life journey that led to it falling on that rock on the exact day I would walk past - God knows my appreciation for leaves... did he orchestrate all the events so that leaf would fall on that rock so I would enjoy it?

It sounds so silly, but maybe.

I want my life to glorify my God. So when I photograph the works of his hands, calling attention to it, that's what I hope to be doing. When I notice, appreciate and enjoy all the wonderful things he made, down to the smallest details, I think he notices, appreciates and enjoys my joy.

If you know the story of Mary and Martha, you know that Martha was the one who was in the kitchen, working very hard cooking and cleaning because Jesus was in her house and she wanted things to be just right. This is completely understandable. But Mary sat at Jesus' feet and listened to him speak. Jesus told Martha she was worried about too many things, while Mary had chosen the one thing that was good for her (or something along those lines).

In Donald Miller's book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years he wrote, "Nearly every day in the summer, I take my dog to Westmoreland Park, where she plays in the creek. She runs up and down through the creek bed, diving headlong into the water, chasing ducks. Sometimes when I watch her I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in the stories. Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just is a dog. All she wants to do is chase ducks and sticks and do other things that make both her and me happy. It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and to keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure."


Sometimes life and even happiness is too simple we can't accept it, and by trying to make ourselves understand, we over-complicate things and wonder why life is so hard. Maybe Lucy's "one thing" is to chase sticks and ducks. And maybe my "one thing" is taking photos.