God's creation

A couple of weeks ago my grandmother, my sister and I, along with our children, spent a week at a cottage together.  The temperature soared into the 40s with the humidex, and sleep was hard to come by in the stifling air.  That was how one morning found me wandering the shores by the cottage at sunrise, well before my children began to stir.

The heat was visible in the hazy air.  The lake gave no relief; even its colour was a purple-grey that gave no indication of the deep blue cool promise it usually offers.  I grabbed my camera to capture some of the stillness of God's creation.

After the trip, when I looked back over the footage, I was disappointed by the results.  The images I captured were beautiful in their own right, with the light playing over the angles, sunbursts on the water, well framed and focused photographs, but none of the shots seemed right.  The wide angles were too wide to carve out detail and the close ups excluded the vastness of the beauty.

There was a moment as I stood on the shores of the lake in which the horizon receded into a tiny strip of land, and the towering trees were but a pencil line above that.  What caught my breath was the vast expanse overhead, the feeling of the infinite atmosphere bent in a covering arc over the earth below.  The uniform colour of blue was light and hazy and, at the same time, at the feeling of expanding forever into space and folding in to protect its inhabitants.

It's in these type of quiet moments that my soul knows this life is not an accident.