As an aspiring photographer and videographer, over the years I have become very aware of how important light is to my craft.  Sometimes you have too much light, and you end up overexposing the photo.  Sometimes you have too little light, and you underexpose, leaving the details of the photo in darkness, unrecoverable.  Manual exposure of a photo is a delicate balancing act, involving specific amounts of light over an absurdly specific period of time.  The differences we are talking about between a properly exposed photo and a ruined photo are very small, sometimes measured in mere hundredths of a second.  For a photographer, too much light can be as bad as too little.   Sometimes you just don’t get it right, and you get burnt.

I have been in Haiti for 12 days now, and I made the mistake of sitting in the sunlight during church this morning.  I realized my mistake pretty early on, but my stubbornness meant that I couldn’t move without a really good reason.  So I sat in the last pew in the east corner of the church for what was likely a 2 hour church service.  By the end, I was feeling pretty thoroughly cooked, and began leaning into the nearby concrete pillar for respite from the beating rays of the sun.  I figured out how to place my arms in such a way that I could keep the sun off of them.  The dress code in Haitian church is pretty conservative, so I had already worn long pants, but I kept switching my leg position in order to rotate various parts in and out of the heat.

The sun in Haiti is nothing to trifle with.  Too much and you’ll get burnt.

Sometimes I think that like the sun, we forget just how intense God is.  We call him friend, father, and I’ve even heard Jesus called “the original hippie”.  We toss around his name like a plaything sometimes, making it a punchline or using it as an accent word.  We slap his name on our poorly driven cars, wear the symbol of his execution around our necks, and add pithy phrases like “show us your glory” to our worship songs.  We forget that this “friend” and “father” spoke the sun itself into existence.   We forget that Moses was only allowed to see the place where God’s glory had just passed by because the sight of God’s actual glory, God in his full brightness, would have killed Moses.

God is no one to trifle with.

In this world of light and darkness, God strikes a balance with us.  I can not simplify God to some elaborate equation of light over time, because he is far too complicated for that.  I can not distill him to a photographic formula that results in a perfect picture.  I can however share what I learned today in the boiling sun of a Haitian church service.

As I sat in the back, children from the orphanage at Tytoo would occasionally sit beside me, and in that moment all of my efforts of self-preservation would evaporate as I desperately tried to shade them from the sun with my body.   If I am being honest, my efforts were pretty futile, and probably amusing to anyone who may have been watching me from a distance, but I didn’t care.  I wanted to spare the beautiful children sitting beside me as much discomfort as I could.  I would take a step forward to make sure my shadow would fall across them while we were singing, and I would sit up straight to provide them with as much shadow as I could during the sermon.

I doubt the kids really ever realized what I was doing, but for me it was an attempted expression of love.  I still don’t know the names of all of the kids here, but I knew that I wanted to protect them in any way I could.  I was willing to give up the poor shelter of a concrete pillar to bring just a little bit of soothing shadow to a small child who choose to sit next to me.   How much more does God want to protect us, his children?

God’s glory is not some terrible thing that strikes people dead for fun.  In the way that a great photograph can change your life, just a glimpse of the fullness of God would leave you forever changed, unable to continue in imperfection.  When faced with true perfection, the beauty of it would inspire you to destroy yourself, lest you mar the perfect thing in front of you.  The light of God’s glory is bright indeed, piercing through ourselves, whom the bible repeatedly calls shadows, here for only a moment, then gone as light falls over us.  What shadow can remain in the light of God?

For our sake, Jesus came.

For our sake, Jesus placed himself between us and his Father, sheltering us in the shadow of his wings, allowing us to see little glimpses of the fullness of who God is.  Jesus took our own sins upon himself so that we might one day stand in the presence of God’s glory.  Jesus has shielded us, though he himself is the light of the world, placing His body between us and a light far too powerful for us to withstand.  We are held in his arms, safe in his shadow.  One day we will be made new, strong enough to stand in God’s presence, but until then we are blinded in the brightness of a shadow that keeps us alive.

He protects us in the shadow of his wings, it is an expression of his love for us.