Devotional for Tuesday, December 20, 2016
“Seeing the Not So Obvious Beauty Around Us”
by Dona Hake
Today I will be sharing with you from some creative inspiration I experienced yesterday. I belong to a photography group on Facebook, and I have come to know some very talented and sweet photographers from all over the world. Our prompt for Monday was ~nature~. One of the other members from Canada was chatting with me online the other evening, and I expressed to her that I was not sure if I would post for ~nature~ for things are so drab in my backyard right now. I actually came to the conclusion to not even try. So on Monday morning as I was having my coffee I was challenged by a memory of a teachable moment I had with a photographer that I once worked with. We shot in a studio and did Senior Portrait photography for Seniors in the area in which I live.
Every once and a while we would encounter those precious young people that were not comfortable in front of our lens. You know…they felt everything was not perfect, and they we so insecure. They just did not want their picture taken.
This photographer spoke these words to me, and I will never forget them… “Dona, anyone can photograph a beautiful person….it is those that are not comfortable with who they are that are challenges. We must be able to capture who they are, and that is what beautiful truly is.” I believe that I really developed in that studio and learned how to truly photograph a person. I took that bit of wisdom and learned in a big way how to get an insecure teenager to laugh and relax with me, and I was able to capture who they were…not who they compared themselves to. I used to love hearing them say, “I love these pictures of myself!!!”
So yesterday in the drab surroundings of my backyard I grabbed my camera, my puppy dog and her favorite ball and headed into the freezing cold temps to capture something beautiful! It was my pursuit to find something that stood out as different and beautiful. Believe me, I had to looked so closely for almost everything was dead and there was not much color to capture. I just knew if I looked closely enough I would surely see it…and there it was!
There in the midst of berry bushes that had lost every leaf I saw these pretty little green leaves refusing to die and drop off in freezing cold temps. In the midst of my not so colorful backyard, I just thought they stood out as something beautiful! I learned a spiritual lesson from this as well. It challenged my heart to the truth that sometimes there may be circumstances or people that are hard to deal with. Sometimes it is just very hard to see the good, and we have to look extra hard, for it is there for us to see…if we just purpose ourselves to see. You know that God sees something beautiful in all of us even though we may not feel so good about ourselves. We too need to look for that beauty in people the same way. In difficult circumstances we may find it hard to see something positive yet our God turns such circumstances into opportunities for us to watch Him do wonderful things.
Today I encourage you to look a little closer at your surroundings. You may just see something you have not noticed before. Take extra time with that person that may seem so difficult, the Lord may just show you something that you are missing because you are so focused on the negative. Our God is good and He has many surprises for us to discover as we look at this world through His eyes!