In Focus

I stopped this morning in my driveway to take some time to enjoy our crab-apple tree. Most of the year it’s ugly – I must admit. In the summer it drops leaves, continually, and when it has fruit, those are always falling on the ground, too. It’s not like a beautiful maple in the fall – it’s just a bare tree with a few straggling leaves. In the winter – just dead wood. But in the spring, when the weather is right, it blooms a beautiful dark pink color. I’ve posted pictures of the buds opening for the past two days.

This morning, most of those buds had become flowers. It was at its most beautiful for the entire year – covered in pink flowers. Me, being me, tried to take some pictures.

The problem with taking close-ups of flowers is the wind. If the wind blows, the flowers moves, and the image is blurry. This morning was overcast, so there was less light than a sunny day, which means longer shutter “open” times, which means that the images were even blurrier.

Standing there, under our beautiful pink tree, with the wind blowing, and the braches softly stirring under its motivation was a grace-filled time. The wind reeked havoc on my pictures, but it the movement made the flowers, in person, even more lovely. It was just loveliness that was impossible for me to capture.

That’s frustrating for me. I can see, right in front of me, the image that could be captured. I take the picture, and it’s awful. Blurry, focused wrong, just not at all what it could have been. So I just give up (after several attempts).

Is God sometimes like that? Is he a three-dimensional God in a two-dimensional world? Is he a God of motion pictures, when the only tool we have is a “still” camera? There is so much about him that we can never capture, never explain, never understand. And yet, knowing all of that, and seeing him “in a mirror, dimly,” we still know that he is lovely beyond imagination.

And then, for one brief moment, the flowers stop dancing in the wind, and I can get the picture. For one brief moment, we see God clearly, and then the Lord of the Dance moves again, and we are just left with memory of clarity.