I bought a new camera recently. It's not an expensive, all singing , all dancing sort, with interchangeable lenses and more settings than an aeroplane cockpit. In fact the only two criteria that it had to meet, when I was browsing in the shop, was, first it had to be compact and slim, to fit inside a shirt pocket and, secondly, it had to be cheap. The fact that it had a zoom lens, took eight megapixel pictures and could record short movies seemed less important, since most cameras appeared to have those capabilities anyhow.For the last few years my camera has been my phone and while it served a purpose and was handy to carry, there's only so much quality you can get with two megapixels, though it did tick all the other boxes for convenience, size and cheapness. But this year had to be different. After all it was the old silver wedding anniversary and I wanted to have some good evidence of our holiday.
Anyway , it's a straight forward sort of device to operate, if you forget all the extras and just want to point and shoot to at least have a photographic record, never mind the quality, so I made sure I had a large enough memory card to store all the things we would see. And of course there are some great shots of various places. After all, it's just a matter of pressing one button to open the lens shutter, using the zoom control and then clicking another button to take the shot. So I would love to be telling you about the four pictures we have of three crosses on a hill that we came across at various locations during our drive, or the 'welcome to west Virginia', 'welcome to Kentucky', 'welcome to Indiana', 'welcome to Ohio' or 'welcome to Michigan' signs that we passed, but you'll have to take my word for it because there is not a scrap of photographic evidence for any of them. The common denominator in all those missed photo opportunities ? Well I'd rather not elaborate, but I was driving so I couldn't be responsible! I'm sure you get my drift. I think I'm going to make an album full of blank pages with captions telling the viewer what should be in the empty space.I guess it's all about being prepared, isn't it? There's really no point in having the equipment if we don't know how to use it. Or maybe, we just never take the time to get prepared.
I've had a Bible for longer than I can remember but if I don't get familiar with it, I'll never know the impact it can make on my life and the true path that God wants to lead me along. All week, everywhere I turn, that verse in Jeremiah 29 and 11 keeps appearing, where God says 'I know the plans I have for you.' So if I don't bother to read His guidebook, I may never get to find out exactly what those plans are and my album will just be pages and pages of what should have been and I'll have to take His word for it. Maybe we need to zoom in to get the bigger picture!
