I Took The Photographs

She has a folder on the laptop called BAPTISMS and inside it there are eleven folders and every one of them is somebody's name.

She is not in any of them.

Not once, not in the corner of a frame, not reflected in a window. She has checked, which is the part she would rather you did not know. One wet Tuesday last autumn she went through all eleven, three hundred and something photographs, looking for herself the way you look for yourself in a class photo, and she is not there, because of course she is not, because she was the one holding the camera.

She is good at it. That is not false modesty, it is just true. She knows to stand where the light is behind the person and not behind her. She knows the shot is not the going under, everybody thinks it is the going under, it is the two seconds after, when the face has not decided what it is doing yet. She knows to get the hands of the people on the edge of the frame, because in ten years the person will want to know who was holding them.

She has done Kieran, who was nineteen and shook. She has done Mrs Adeyemi, who went in with her wig on and came out with it on and nobody has ever mentioned it. She has done the twins on the same afternoon in the same pond and got one shot of both of them laughing at each other with their hair flat to their heads that hangs framed in a hallway she has only been in twice.

And after every one of them she goes home, and she puts the card in the reader, and she sits at the kitchen table in the blue light with a cup of tea going cold, and she edits until one in the morning because she wants them to be right.

Nobody has ever asked her why she is always behind the camera. Why would they. She has a camera.

Her sister came the closest, at the twins' one, when they were packing up. She said, "You could put it down, you know. For once." And she said, "Then who would take them?" and her sister said "Fair enough" and picked up a bag, and that was the whole conversation, and it has been going round in her head for two years.

Which side of the lens

I am going to leave your camera alone.

Nobody is taking it off you, and I am not going to make the obvious speech about putting it down and being present, partly because you have heard it and mostly because it misses what is actually going on. You are not hiding behind that camera. You are serving with it, and there are eleven people with the best photographs of their lives because of you, and that is a real thing that a real person did.

What I want to do is turn it round for a minute. Not the camera. The question.

Because the reason you have three hundred photographs and are in none of them is not a photography problem. It is a habit of standing, and it started long before you owned a lens.

Here is what is actually true of you this morning, and I want you to receive it rather than assess it.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.1 John 3:1

Read what that verse is doing. It is not making an argument. It is pointing. Behold means look at this, stop and look at this, and what we are being told to look at is not our own conduct but a manner of love that had to be described rather than measured, because there was no measure available.

You are called a child of God, and you are called it right now, in a kitchen, at whatever hour this is. That is not a warm sentiment from me. That is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is arriving in your chest instead of being read and filed with all the other true things.

And notice the passive there. Hath bestowed. That we should be called. You did not do this. There is no version of that verse where the reader earns the name by being useful, and there is no version where the one who takes the photographs gets a slightly reduced title.

Now let me say the thing I actually think.

You have organized your life so that you are always the one who makes other people's moments come out well. And that is a good instinct that has gone one step too far, because it has quietly become the only position you know how to occupy. Being in the frame feels like taking something. Somewhere in you there is an arithmetic that says the room only has so much attention in it and yours would be coming out of somebody else's.

You are not spending anybody's attention by being loved. God has more than the room does, and Scripture says His love was bestowed in a manner that had to be pointed at rather than counted, and the Spirit in you is the deposit and the proof of it.

I want to say something about the wet Tuesday, too.

You went through three hundred photographs looking for yourself. Whatever you have called that since, I am not going to call it vanity, because it was not. It was a woman checking whether she exists in her own life. And there is no shame anywhere near that, and God was not embarrassed by it, and I suspect He was nearer to that kitchen table on that Tuesday than He has been to some services.

You are seen. Not photographed. Seen, which is a different and much larger word, and the word of God is what establishes it, and the same Spirit who has been beside you at eleven of those things is the one who has never once needed a photograph to know where you were standing.

And here is the last one, and it is the one I want you to take out of the room. You have been treating the frame as though it decides who belongs. It does not. A frame is a rectangle. It is a decision somebody made about where to stand, and the family in that hallway with the twins on the wall would tell you in a second that the person who took it belongs to that afternoon as much as anyone in it.