The Power of A Photo

I have a confession to make. I have a really bad obsession with taking and printing pictures. Like, a real bad obsession. If you are a good friend of mine, this you know and have made fun of me for it.

It's really because love to capture moments. I love being able to look back through a photo album and remember what was happening before and after the photograph was taken and all the memories from those events. Pictures take me thorugh a journey over and over again that I so often forget. Because it is so easy to remember just the hard times right? When things get hard, you only remember the hard or get angry when you do rememeber how good it used to be and it isn't any longer. Pictures help me remember the best parts of life that I choose to forget.

I was taking a trip back through some photos and came accross these two. They were taken within the same week of each other. In the first one this was at my best friend Christi's lake house. We were celebrating the bachelorette party for our best friend Lauren who got married that next weekend. She is the first of the three of us to be married and we have long awaited this day! What a celebration of the people that God calls together for his glory.

This other one is of me and my two best friends from college. This was graduation night and oh my, was that a great memory. We all felt on top of the world after finally finishing up our ridiculously hard semester and four years of college. We had a bond you can't even describe.

I looked at these and just sighed. I looked at them and sighed because this was the last time I remember being really, really happy. A friend that made my heart leap at just the mention of his name. Feeling like I get to take on a new world after graduating and excitedly awaiting the unexpected for a job and living space. Celebrating with the best two girls in the world the union of a beautiful couple. My heart was so full I literally couldn't handle any more. These pictures make remember so many moments that I didn't capture with the camera even. That is why I love pictures.

Memories are great aren't they? They are powerful enough to even bring back emotions, even if for a brief time that you forgot how to feel. But a word of caution: life is not meant to be stuck in a photo. You can so easily remember how good or bad it used to be, but you can't go back. You can never go back to that happiness, and luckily you can never go back to that darkness. It will get both better and worse. Time changes, but pictures don't. They are reminders to what we have been given in this life that we never think to be thankful for or learn from. I desire more than anything to go back and be that soulfully peaceful and joyful again. But we can't go back, only forward.

 So keep taking the pictures (you know I will), but let it only become a memory of what you have been given. You can't go back, so walk with open eyes into the moments you are in now and doing what you can do make even better memories instead of dwelling on past ones. Because living a life in the past keeps you from living in the present. We must choose to live in the present.