As an aspiring photographer and videographer, over the years I have become very aware of how important light is to my craft.\u00a0 Sometimes you have too much light, and you end up overexposing the photo.\u00a0 Sometimes you have too little light, and you underexpose, leaving the details of the photo in darkness, unrecoverable.\u00a0 Manual exposure of a photo is a delicate balancing act, involving specific amounts of light over an absurdly specific period of time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For a photographer, too much light can be as bad as too little.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes you just don\u2019t get it right, and you get burnt.<\/p>\n
I have been in Haiti for 12 days now, and I made the mistake of sitting in the sunlight during church this morning.\u00a0 I realized my mistake pretty early on, but my stubbornness meant that I couldn\u2019t move without a really good reason.\u00a0 So I sat in the last pew in the east corner of the church for what was likely a 2 hour church service.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I figured out how to place my arms in such a way that I could keep the sun off of them.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The sun in Haiti is nothing to trifle with.\u00a0 Too much and you\u2019ll get burnt.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I think that like the sun, we forget just how intense God is.\u00a0 We call him friend, father, and I\u2019ve even heard Jesus called \u201cthe original hippie\u201d.\u00a0 We toss around his name like a plaything sometimes, making it a punchline or using it as an accent word.\u00a0 We slap his name on our poorly driven cars, wear the symbol of his execution around our necks, and add pithy phrases like \u201cshow us your glory\u201d to our worship songs.\u00a0 We forget that this \u201cfriend\u201d and \u201cfather\u201d spoke the sun itself into existence.\u00a0 \u00a0We forget that Moses was only allowed to see the place where God\u2019s glory had just passed by<\/span> because the sight of God\u2019s actual glory, God in his full brightness, would have killed Moses.<\/p>\n God is no one to trifle with.<\/p>\n In this world of light and darkness, God strikes a balance with us.\u00a0 I can not simplify God to some elaborate equation of light over time, because he is far too complicated for that.\u00a0 I can not distill him to a photographic formula that results in a perfect picture.\u00a0 I can however share what I learned today in the boiling sun of a Haitian church service.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u2019t care.\u00a0 I wanted to spare the beautiful children sitting beside me as much discomfort as I could.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I doubt the kids really ever realized what I was doing, but for me it was an attempted expression of love.\u00a0 I still don\u2019t know the names of all of the kids here, but I knew that I wanted to protect them in any way I could.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 How much more does God want to protect us, his children?<\/p>\n God\u2019s glory is not some terrible thing that strikes people dead for fun.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The light of God\u2019s 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.\u00a0 What shadow can remain in the light of God?<\/p>\n For our sake, Jesus came.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Jesus took our own sins upon himself so that we might one day stand in the presence of God\u2019s glory.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We are held in his arms, safe in his shadow.\u00a0 One day we will be made new, strong enough to stand in God\u2019s presence, but until then we are blinded in the brightness of a shadow that keeps us alive.<\/p>\n He protects us in the shadow of his wings, it is an expression of his love for us.<\/p>\nDid you enjoy what you just read? Consider sharing it with your friends!<\/h3>