Out Of The Photograph Since 2011

Somebody always says it around six, when the light goes gold and the food is finished and the little ones have got sticky.

"Everybody on the steps."

It takes eleven minutes to get eighteen people onto four concrete steps, and every year it takes the same eleven minutes, and every year somebody says we should have done this earlier. The dog has to be caught. Uncle Ray has to be woken. Somebody's boyfriend has to be told it is fine, he is family now, get in.

And every year, at about minute two, Cheryl says the same six words.

"Give it here. I'll take it."

She is good at it, honestly. She gets people to move in, she notices the one at the end who is half out of shot, she takes four so there is one where nobody blinked. Her sister says she is the only person in this family who can take a picture where Ray's eyes are open.

Nobody has ever asked her why she does not get in.

There is a photograph in her mother's hallway from the summer of 2011. Same steps. Same tree. Cheryl is in the middle of it in a blue shirt, and he is standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder, and they are both laughing at something out of frame that neither of them remembers.

Everybody in that family knows which photograph it is. Nobody has moved it. Nobody would.

It came apart in the fall of that year, and it was not a small thing, and the two years after it were not small either.

So in 2012 she took the picture. And in 2013 she took the picture. And it stopped being a decision somewhere around 2015 and became just what she does, the way somebody else always makes the potato salad.

She is fifty four now. She is fine. That is not a brave thing she is saying, it is just true: she likes her job, she has a small apartment with good light, she goes to the coast in October by herself and enjoys it.

But every year, when the eleven minutes are done and she is standing on the grass with the camera up and eighteen people are looking at her and shouting at her to hurry up, there is one second, right before she presses it, when the thought goes through.

There is no record of me at all since 2011.

Then she counts to three and everybody says something ridiculous and she takes four so there is one where nobody blinked.

The first person who ever gave God a name

There is a woman in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis who has no lines until the very end, and almost nothing about her is her own.

She does not choose her country, her household, her work, or the arrangement that gets her pregnant. She runs. She ends up at a spring in the wilderness on the road to a place she was not going to reach, and there is nobody there. No family. No witnesses. Nothing anybody could photograph.

And out there, in the least documented moment in that whole household's history, God finds her and speaks to her.

What she does next is one of the most astonishing things in the Bible. She gives God a name. She is the first person in Scripture to do it, and the name she gives Him is not majesty and not power. It is this: You are the God who sees me.

You are seen by the God a runaway woman named in a desert, and He was seeing long before anybody was looking. Genesis 16:13 is where that name enters the written word, and it enters through somebody nobody was keeping a record of. His Spirit does not need an audience present in order to make a line like that land in a woman standing on a lawn with a camera up.

She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: "You are the God who sees me," for she said, "I have now seen the One who sees me."Genesis 16:13

Notice where the seeing happened. Not at the household. Not on any steps. In the one stretch of her life where there was no picture and no witness and no one to tell it to afterward.

You have been seen the whole time, including in every single year there is no photograph of. That is what is written into Genesis 16:13, a seeing that ran through the undocumented part and not around it, and the Spirit says it again over a fifty four year old woman who is very good at getting eighteen people to look at the same lens.

Nobody lights a lamp in order to hide it

Now, there is a verse a few pages into Matthew that gets aimed at people like Cheryl, and it is aimed wrong.

Jesus says nobody lights a lamp and then puts it under a bowl. And a certain kind of teaching takes that sentence, turns it around, and hands it to the quiet person in the room as an accusation about their personality.

Read it again and see who is doing the acting. Somebody lights the lamp. Somebody sets it down. Every verb in the sentence belongs to the person holding the match, and not one of them belongs to the lamp. It is not a rebuke aimed at a lamp for being where it is. It is a plain observation about what people who light lamps do next.

You are a lamp that somebody else lit and somebody else placed. Matthew 5:15 puts the lighting and the placing in the hands of the one with the flame, exactly as it is written, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you with an opinion about where you have been standing at family parties since 2011.

So let me say this as clearly as I know how. Nothing here is asking you to get in the photograph this year. If you take it again this summer, take it again. There is nothing owed. A person who has real reasons for staying out of a frame is not a coward and is not behind, and I am not going to treat a hallway photograph from a year that broke as a hurdle you failed to clear.

You were never hiding from Him, and there has never been a version of you that He was missing. The written word gives us a God who is named by someone with no witnesses at all, and His Spirit says that over the years in your life that nobody has a picture of.