Our family expects it now. Toward the end our times together when everyone is gathering children and leftovers, I quite suddenly ask if we can take a picture.
Cue the collective group groan. Like, come on, don't we have enough pictures of us already? Do we have to? We'll get one next time.
With cameras on our phones, we have no valid excuses.
But it is not just the picture I am after, capturing a slice of life, like a time warp, freezing us at a certain age. It is far more. A photograph does not just commemorate a particular point in time, even the spontaneous ones. It does not just help us remember at some future time what we looked like with some really bad hair styles.
But the very act of taking a picture enables us to seize the moment. We are together right now, no matter the occasion. I want to bask in those times, present tense, our lives recorded and interwoven in a chronicle of visual images. It is all about recognizing --right in the moment-- the extreme value of being together.
I have one of those last minute pictures that was taken at our youngest daughter's wedding, now six years ago, just my three brothers and me at the end of the celebration. I loved that they came. I loved that we were together. And we have a precious picture of it. I don't even know who snapped the picture with the camera on their phone.
How oblivious we were that just a year and a half later, a totally unexpected worldwide pandemic would separate us. Several months went by, and we celebrated my older brother Bobby's 70th birthday on zoom. And just a year after that, he suddenly succumbed to covid.
It is the last picture of the four of us together. And I am so glad we have that shot. It is not just a photo at a wedding, but a picture of relationship. It still makes me smile. And brings forth a lifetime of memories.
Seize the moment of being together. Take that picture --posed or not, complained about, or even inconvenient. It is not so much about the images as it is about embracing those little times together.
And we can never have enough of those.
...apples of gold
in a setting of silver.
Proverbs 25. 11
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