Almost Gone Forever

Click. Click. Click.

Lowering my hand, I press play. Hum, not bad. Now that one, it is good. And that one, hum, I think I'll just do a way with it. I'll do it later.

And with that I slipped my camera in my pocketbook.

Fast forward.

I sat organizing my photos on my laptop. I take a lot of pictures so this was going to be no easy task. I decided to make "folders" labeled for each year and assign the pictures to their respective year. So I begin weeding out the duds. Ones that were blurry, ones that were dark, ones where my thumb was in the picture! You do it too huh!?

And there it was. The one that was almost gone forever. I glanced at it and thought, what is that? Why did I take that picture? And then I seen it.

 At first glance I thought, why did I take a picture of a bunch of cars? My eyes were drawn to what I seen was closest to me- the cars and window sill. But what was off in the distance was the beautiful part. The distance was why I took the picture!

With a little T.L.C. I could crop out the boring details (cars and window sill) and only share the most beautiful part! And that I did.

Do the mountains look familiar? They should. Take a look at my title bar above! Then God gave a little nudge in my spirit, "I take things that in the beginning look like a bad situation or mistake and turn them into something beautiful. You can only see the here and how, things that are close up, but I see what is off in the distance, the truly beautiful outcome!"

When we go thru difficult circumstances, we are only seeing "the cars". God is the one who sees "the mountains". We can take the situation and "crop" it to find something beautiful, if we do not "delete" it first. We can turn that ugly picture (circumstance) into something to be treasured.

Friend, we go through things in life when we wonder why. But I want to remind you, we only see the here and now. Who knows what God has in store for us at the end! We can allow those circumstances in our lives to cause us to become bitter or angry or we can choose to focus on the good in the situation.

This picture was taken from the 5th floor of a NICU hospital room. My nephew had complications at birth. Even though we were in the midst of a bad situation, there was something beautiful nearby- this magnificent view. I just had to look around and see it!

What are you going through that you need to find some beauty in? You may think that you want to "hit delete" on it but if you do, you may miss out on something beautiful at the end!!

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."2 Corinthians 1:3-4