Nine Thousand Photographs And I Am In Eleven

You started scrolling backwards on Sunday and you were not looking for anything.

You went back through the summer, and the spring, and the thing at Easter, and somewhere around the middle of last year you stopped noticing what was in them and started noticing what was not.

You counted. That is the part that has stayed with you.

Eleven. In a year. Four of them are the ones your sister took at that meal, two are accidental, and one is a photograph of you asleep on a sofa that somebody thought was funny.

Nine thousand photographs of your household in a year, and eleven of them have you in them.

And here is the thing that made your chest go tight, and I think it is the real subject of this whole site: you understood, sitting there on a Sunday, that if somebody looked through those pictures in forty years they would see a family that seemed to be missing somebody.

Every birthday. Every first day. Every trip, every visit, every ordinary Saturday in the kitchen. All of it recorded, in enormous detail, from your point of view, with you not in it.

You took them. That is why. And that is not a small thing to have done and it is not a complaint.

But you have been in the room for every single one of those nine thousand moments and the record does not know it.

So this article has one action in it, and it is not about how you look or what you would need to change first. It is simply about handing the phone over.

God is not unrighteous to forget your work

There is a verse in Hebrews about work that nobody recorded, and it is written to exactly this.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (Hebrews 6:10, King James Version)

God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love.

Notice the odd construction. It does not say God remembers. It says God is not unrighteous to forget, which puts the forgetting in the category of injustice: it would be wrong, and He is not that.

That is a much stronger statement than a reassurance. It says forgetting what somebody has poured out would be a moral failure, and it is not a moral failure God commits.

And look at what is being remembered. Work and labor of love, shown toward his name, in ministering to people. Not achievements. Not the visible parts. The ordinary labor done for people, which by its nature leaves no record and gets noticed by nobody.

That is nine thousand photographs.

You were behind the camera because you were the one paying attention. Somebody has to be looking at everybody else and noticing when a thing is worth keeping, and that person is doing a kind of work, all day, for years, and it is completely invisible in the output.

The album is an honest record of what everybody looked like and a false record of who was there.

Your being there is not forgotten and forgetting it would be an injustice, and standing behind the camera has never once meant you were absent. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody scrolling backwards through a year on a Sunday.

The record is for them, not for you

Here is the practical half, and it is about who those photographs are actually for.

You have been thinking of them as your pictures. They are not going to be yours for long.

In thirty years those nine thousand images will be looked at by people who are currently small and who will not remember most of what is in them. They will look for particular things, and I can tell you what they will look for, because everybody looks for the same thing.

They look for the people. Specifically, they look for the ones who are gone or grown, at the ages they were, doing ordinary things.

And your children will look for you.

They will want to know what your face did when you laughed at that age. What you were like at forty, in your own kitchen, on a Tuesday, in the middle of raising them. They will not be looking at your hair or what you were wearing or whether you were carrying more than you wanted to. Nobody has ever looked at a photograph of their mother and assessed her.

And they will find eleven.

That is what makes this urgent rather than sentimental. The reason to be in the pictures is not self esteem, and this article is not asking you to feel differently about yourself in order to earn a place in your own album. The record is a document that outlives you and is read by people who love you, and at the moment it is missing its author.

And the fix costs nothing. Not money, not a decision about how you look, not a change in you of any kind. It costs handing somebody a phone.

Those photographs are for people who will look for you in them, and being missing has never once been a small omission. The written word refuses to let faithful invisible work go unrecorded, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody whose family record does not know she was in the room.

Hand the phone over

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

Hand the phone to somebody today and be in one photograph.

Anybody. Your husband, the twelve year old, a friend, the person at the next table. The twelve year old is best, because a twelve year old takes a photograph without any ceremony at all.

Hand it over and say: take one of me with them.

And then that is it. One photograph.

Now here is what I want to say about the objections, because there will be about four of them and they will all arrive in the first two seconds.

Not today, because of how you look. Not now, because the kitchen is a mess. Not this one, because nothing is happening. Wait until the weekend, when there is a reason.

Every one of those is a postponement, and the postponements are what produced eleven. Not one big decision to be absent, just several thousand small reasonable delays, each of which made complete sense at the time.

So the whole assignment is to override one of them, once, today.

And do it in the middle of something ordinary. Not posed, not tidied, not arranged. At the table, on the sofa, in the kitchen with what you are wearing.

And do not direct it. Do not take it again because your eyes were shut. Do not check it and ask them to redo it. That is the second thing that produced eleven, because a photograph you have to approve is a photograph that mostly gets deleted.

One picture. Whatever it is. Leave it there.

You are able to override one postponement today, and eleven was never one decision but several thousand small delays. Hebrews 6:10 will not let the unrecorded work go unremembered, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody handing a phone to a twelve year old.