Sunday, April 8, 2018

Living Outside the Photo

The other day, I brought up to Chris that he never takes candid pictures of me.

All of my life whenever I thought of my future husband, I envisioned the cute social media posts. The ones where I'm sitting across from him at the coffee shop and he snaps whenever I'm not looking, holding the coffee cup and gazing out the window. The one where I'm doing laundry and he gets me in the middle of folding a shirt.

I asked him, "Why don't you take pictures? Are you going to take pictures whenever we have kids? Or are you going to have a bunch of candid pictures of you with the kids because I'm taking them and there's not going to be a single picture of me?"

His response {to my sass} blew me away.

"I'll try my best to document the moments, but I'm going to be too busy living them."




It shook me. How much time do I spend making sure that every scene is just right? How many times have I shifted him to one side, held his hand in a certain way, ensured the lighting was proper, that I ended up missing out on the actual event that was happening? Did I spend too much time having people document our trip to Disney that I didn't enjoy Disney to the fullest? Do I spend too much time waiting for the next photo op?

What if we looked up from our screens more often? What if, instead of finding the perfect filter or making sure we get the picture at the golden hour, we actually took the time to witness the golden hour? What if we lived in the moment, taking in everything God's blessed us with, and for a second didn't care that the rest of social media wasn't going to witness it?

I acknowledge that there are some people (like myself) who want to document the small things as much as the big things. I want to get a picture of Chris laughing over dinner, of him playing video games while I work on my computer, of my family all talking over each other while at family dinner. I don't believe there's anything wrong with that. However. Talking to myself. What if I set my phone down and took part in that conversation with the family? What if I helped Chris out with dinner instead of editing the picture? Or picked up the controller and learned how to play the game he's so in to?

Again. What if I/we lived outside of the photograph? What would we find that we've been missing out on?

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