Everything Is On A Phone

There is nothing on that wall and there are eleven thousand pictures in your hand.

You noticed it properly on Thursday. Somebody came round, and you were making them a drink, and you saw the hall the way a visitor sees it, and it is a good hall, and there is nothing on it.

And you have eleven thousand photographs. You checked afterward, out of curiosity, and the number was worse than you thought.

Eleven thousand. Every birthday of both of them. The day at the coast. Your mother in the garden the year before last. All of it, in your pocket, in a device you look at ninety times a day and never for that.

You do not look at those pictures.

That is the part that came to you on Thursday. Not that the wall is bare, but that having eleven thousand and looking at none of them is a strange condition to have arrived in, and you did not arrive in it by choosing anything.

They are safe. That is what you tell yourself, and it is roughly true. They are backed up, mostly, and you could find any of them in about forty seconds if somebody asked for a specific one.

But nobody ever asks for a specific one, and you never go looking, and the ones from four years ago have not been seen by human eyes since about a week after they were taken.

So this article is one small thing, and I am going to name what it is not first.

It is not a project. I am not going to suggest you do something about eleven thousand photographs, because nobody in history has ever successfully sorted eleven thousand photographs and the suggestion is what makes people close the tab.

And I am not going to tell you where to get anything printed. No service, no shop, no app. You know how to do it or you can find out in a minute, and that is not what has been stopping you.

One picture. Out of the screen. Into your hand.

Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables

There is an instruction in Habakkuk about getting something out of your head and onto a surface.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. (Habakkuk 2:2, King James Version)

Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables.

Habakkuk has been given something. He has it, in the way you have eleven thousand photographs: it exists, it is his, and it is not anywhere anybody can encounter it.

And the instruction is not to remember it, and not to treasure it. It is to write it down and put it on a surface.

Make it plain upon tables. Tables here are tablets, boards, something physical that stands in a place, and the point of that is not storage. It is availability.

And the reason given is the striking part: that he may run that readeth it.

Somebody running past. Not somebody who has sat down to study it, not somebody who has come specially. A person moving through, at speed, who catches it because it is in the way.

That is a picture on a wall in a hall.

Everything you own is in a device that requires you to decide to look. The looking never happens, not because you do not care, but because nothing is ever in the way of anybody. Nothing catches you as you go past. A phone requires an intention, and intentions about photographs are exactly the intention that never gets around to happening.

A picture on a wall is read by somebody running.

What is given is written and set on a surface where it can be caught by somebody moving, and holding it has never once been the same as having it available. Habakkuk 2:2 says make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody seeing her own hall the way a visitor sees it.

An object is different

Here is the practical half, and it is one distinction.

A printed photograph is a different kind of thing from the same image on a screen, and the difference is not sentimentality.

An object occupies a place. It has to be walked past. It is seen by everybody who comes into that house, including people who would never be shown a phone. It can be picked up by a child who is too small to be handed a device, and it will still be there in thirty years without anybody maintaining an account.

And it cannot be scrolled past. That is the largest difference and it is worth understanding.

On a screen every photograph is one of eleven thousand, and your eye treats it accordingly: it is an item in a stream, and the next one is already arriving. Nothing gets looked at for more than a second because everything is equally available.

Out of the stream and onto a wall, one picture stops being an item and becomes a thing. It gets looked at properly, and by people other than you, and it acquires the specific weight that a photograph in a frame has always had and that a photograph in a folder has never had.

And here is the thing about safety, which is what you have been relying on.

Backed up is not the same as kept.

Eleven thousand photographs that nobody looks at are being stored rather than kept. They are safe in the sense that a box in a locked storage unit is safe, and no member of your family has any relationship with a single one of them.

One printed picture is fully kept. It is in the world, in a place, doing what a photograph is for.

Stored and kept are two different states, and a photograph nobody can hold has never once been fully kept. The written word puts the thing on a surface where it can be caught in passing, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody whose family has no relationship with eleven thousand images.

Get one printed and hang it where you pass

So here is the assignment, and it is one picture.

Get one photograph printed this week and put it somewhere you pass daily.

One. And here is how to choose it, because the choosing is where this stalls: do not go through eleven thousand.

Take the first one that comes to mind right now. There is one. It arrived while you were reading the last paragraph. That is the one.

If nothing arrived, take the most recent picture of the people in your house that has all of them in it, and stop there.

Do not scroll to find a better one. If you start scrolling you will be in there for forty minutes, you will find nine candidates, you will not be able to choose, and by the weekend this will not have happened. That is exactly how it has gone every previous time you have thought about this.

One. First one. Order it.

And then put it somewhere you pass daily. Not somewhere it will be seen properly, and not somewhere significant. On the way to the bathroom. On the wall by the coats. Beside the kettle.

The point is the passing. You want to be caught by it eight times a day without meaning to, which is what the verse describes and what a phone can never do.

And use whatever frame you have or none at all. Do not wait until you have a nice frame, because a frame you have to go and choose is another week, and another week is how eleven thousand happened.

One picture. This week. On the way past.

You are able to take the first one that came to mind and be done, and choosing well has never once been what this needed. Habakkuk 2:2 says write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody putting one picture on a wall by the coats.