Wading through life

Heather and I

Yes: The exciting news comes a smidge late. I didn’t hit my “early next week” self-imposed deadline. But, hey, it’s worth it! Without further ado… the first picture of me with my marvelous, beautiful girlfriend, Heather!

The abbreviated story goes something like this: I was talking with my good friend Darin sometime Thanksgiving weekend and he mentioned there was some girl in the town he was living in and he “thought of me” when he met her. Mmmmeh… I didn’t think much of it, even though he said she was attractive and loved the Lord. He lived three hours from me. How was that going to work?

Well… I’ll tell you how. We became friends on the dreaded MySpace and exchanged a few–actually quite a few–messages on there. In doing so, we rather quickly discovered we were very much so on the same page spiritually. Always a good starting point, eh? We then did the e-mail thing, along with a few online chats. I secured the phone number before Christmas and we talked for the first time a few days later.

Mid-January was the first “date”, though we didn’t really call it that. And in case you’re wondering, yes, it was an entirely bizarre experience and not at all what either of us expected. But, we got over it and gave it another shot a few weeks later. That went much smoother and a few weeks later we were “official.” In case you lost track of time, those “few weeks later” add up to mid-February.

That’s my quick, blog-able version of it anyway. I’m sure her story would be different.

Anyway, since many of you won’t be meeting Heather anytime soon, I suppose you want to know a bit more about her. But since I’m not quite sure what blog etiquette is for bragging on one’s girlfriend, and since I’m a somewhat private person when it comes to these things, I’ll keep the props succinct, and slightly vague: she’s an amazing, striking woman of God

Prayers appreciated!

Red Moon Rising

Hope you caught tonight’s total lunar eclipse, because there won’t be another one until I’m 31. Five days before Christmas of 2010 is when it will happen next.

Nearly forgetting it was happening tonight, I threw on a hat and gloves, grabbed my tripod and camera bag and headed out to my trusty Springport Rd. / Sandstone Rd. intersection a few miles northwest of Jackson, where a graveyard backs up to a large field. It’s the same place I hunted for perseids in August.

Well, I was pretty unprepared for tonight’s event, not knowing when it was to start, peak or end… nor did I have a charged battery. So, after taking one photo early on, I lost the ability to operate my camera. Assuming the eclipse was going to take only 45 minutes or so, I figured there was no use heading back to my apartment to charge my battery.

About an hour later, and yet to witness the peak of the eclipse, I decided it was worth it to return and charge my battery. So, that’s what I did. Besides, my toes and hands were freezing from the 10° air.

After getting some juice in my battery, I snapped a few pictures outside my apartment and then returned to try and take a few more. The return was pretty much useless because I didn’t get anything good. But it was still a fun evening. Watching the moon turn red before my eyes gave my favorite book Red Moon Rising a whole new meaning. Makes me want to read it again. And it reminds me that I’m part of the army the Lord’s raising up as an answer to the prayers of many.

As the eclipse started, and after I realized my batter was dead, I just spent some time with the Lord, taking in the beautiful, clear winter sky. I remember thinking out loud, God, how big are you?. And I then immediately saw a shooting star. Oh. That big. And I remembered that He’s the one who skips meteors across our atmosphere like we skip stones on a pond.

Tomlin’s “How Great is Our God” of course came to mind, so I broke out into some solitary worship. It’s possible a dog heard me, but I don’t think anyone else. It was a good time. I only walked away with three decent photos. You can check them out at the February 2008 Lunar Eclipse gallery on Flickr.

Sunset 1

I haven’t gone through many of these photos yet, but here are a few from my fabulous Labor Day weekend in the Thumb. The weather was absolutely stunning—as it has been all summer it seems (especially when you have AC)—and so some of us enjoyed time on the water.

I know, I know. Sunset pictures are overdone. But for those of you who don’t get to the Great Lakes often, I hope this is a refreshing look at one of the best things about our amazing state.

Rick Joyner communicates on the Elijahlist a powerful revelatory experience he had with the Lord recently. It’s thick and heavy with relevant material, but I wanted to highlight a few that stirred me in particular:

That which is burning on the heart of God has been there from eternity—it is indestructible and will never die. As we take what is on His heart onto our hearts, that same indestructible life is in us. This is what it really means to know God, to know the deepest things on His heart and to share these with Him in His ultimate purposes. We do not need to have a prophetic experience to do this, but just be a seeker of God. The true seekers of God, those who are truly close to Him, will burn with a fire that is unquenchable. They will not be lukewarm.

The new breed of ministry will not use the people to build their ministries, they will use their ministries to build people. This will result in a revolution in the Church. Selfish ambition will be driven from the ministry of the Church. Christians will begin to love each other and serve out of love. The result of this will be a society of saints who will become a marvel in the earth and a true light to the world.

Those are kinda self-explanatory. But he goes into a section about prophetic artists that really hit me. It was particularly timely because I’ve recently been thinking and praying about what it would be like to be a prophetic photographer. What would it look like to communicate on behalf of the Lord as a photographer? What would it be like to take pictures that drip with His anointing and presence?

Think about this fact: An artist was the first person to be filled with the Holy Spirit, not a priest, king or prophet. This should give us a definite sense of the importance that the Lord gave to art. His dwelling place, the tabernacle, which is a blueprint or model for the Church, the “dwelling place not made with hands,” had to be fashioned by the best of all artists. There is a power in art that the Church has not generally recognized for many centuries now. It must be recovered because the Lord is going to give the artists in His house unprecedented power to prophesy through their art…

…There is an anointing that is about to come upon artists that will be from the Holy Spirit. Art will again be motivated by love for God. This art will have a prophetic power such as has not been given to mankind before. The more pure the love, the more pure and powerful the art will be. These are gifts from God to His Bride, and they will touch her in profound ways to draw her heart to Him and be used to express her heart for Him…

…I am not just talking about painters, sculptors or musicians in this art, but also the true apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers who were given for the equipping of the saints to become the Church we are called to be. They will be so creative in their ministries, that ministry will become one of the most compelling attractions of all. The crafting of words in messages will start to come with such creative power that multitudes will be drawn to their oratory. This is not about entertainment, but an anointing on the art of speaking that the Word of God is worthy to be adorned with.

Creativity, the basic nature of the blessed Creator, will shine through His Church as a witness of His nature. Because her heart will be in such unity with the Creator, creativity will flow from everything she does. The greatest music and the greatest art of every kind will come from the Church as worship to the Lord. These gifts will also both draw and equip the Bride for her highest purpose–her union with the King. It will begin to draw the nations to the feast.

A few years ago, I was meeting with a friend of mine and talking to him about the fact that while I can do a lot of things well, if not excellent, I wasn’t interested in doing these things if they weren’t backed by the Holy Spirit’s anointing. If it’s pictures, or Web sites or written pieces… whatever… I wanted people to encounter God through them. He later suggested that he thought eventually everything we do becomes anointed as we invite God into it. While I think this is true to a certain extent, I believe there are particular gifts and callings God would have us operate in as His ambassadors that He’ll back with more power and authority than others. And that’s where I want to be.

The things I do most naturally and the things that seem to generate the most anointed results are my writing and photography. While my technical mind and personality type helps me excel with things in my current career track, I don’t feel Web design is the anointing “pocket” for me. I think it’s a tool I’m being equipped with to support and transport my writing and photography.

I was particularly encouraged by the above passage because it took me back to a revelation the Lord gave me as I was preparing for my mini art show at a Real Life special event. I feel what I did for this event—showed pictures from travels and wrote an accompanying piece—is a seed for what my future might hold. And while some have told me that traveling around taking pictures and writing about my experiences is a dream of most people—and one that requires the person to be independently wealthy—I’m confident that were God guides, God provides. And if there is a growing outpouring of the Holy Spirit’s anointing on artists and creatives to help prepare the Bride, sign me up

No perseids to be found

I saw quite a few perseids during the hour and a half I stargazed tonight, but none were captured by my camera with 30″ exposure times. So sad.

I would have had a slightly better chance had I done a little more research ahead of time and found out that pointing northeast—toward the constellation Perseus of all places!—increases your chances of seeing lots of perseid meteors. But alas, I didn’t know that at the time.

But that wasn’t really an option anyway, because northeast of my current best-sky-view location are trees and city light pollution. This picture points southwest, actually. Jupiter is the brightest object in the frame, sitting a few degrees above Antares of Scorpius.

As I sat and took in the sky for awhile, noticing shooting stars now and then, a bright flash to my upper right peripheral took me off guard. I jumped from my chair, wondering what it was. All that was there was a streak of light coming from some trees. At first, I thought the streak was a telephone wire bouncing some glare from a nearby property light. But, that didn’t explain the flash. As I watched it some more, the streak faded and I realized it was the remains of probably the brightest meteor I’d ever witnessed. Too bad I only caught a glimpse of it.

Sitting and watching some more, I started picturing the Father, Son and Holy Spirit having a good ol’ time with the meteor shower. To me, they were skipping stones. They’re up there throwing stones at the earth and many would skip a few times along the atmosphere—giving us our shooting stars. But every once in a while, you get that great skipping stone and throw it just right and it bounces ten or 15 times. That was the real bright shooting star I saw out of the corner of my eye. It left a bright trail behind it that lingered for a while… and the Father congratulated the Son on a great throw.

Then, low and behold, I read this article about the meteor shower when I get back to my apartment—the one I should have read ahead of time to learn which way to look in the sky. Toward the end of it is this:

There’s no need to find Perseus in the sky, though. It’s better to scan the whole sky, watching for meteors that flash past us at wider angles from Perseus. The best are called “Earth-grazers”—the ones that skip across the atmosphere like stones across a pond, often leaving long trails behind them.

Simply stunning. My revelation of the Trinity playing with Earth like a pond had been dead-accurate from a scientific-analogy perspective. Could the Lord have given me some insight into what was really going on?

Though I just said I’m surprised by nothing, this one did take me off-guard.