How dare you? Who do you think you are? Why should God talk to you?
So first, a disclaimer.
All those questions at the top of the page, questions many of you might be asking right now—those are my questions, too.
In fact, those very questions, along with statements like “you’re not that important” and “you better watch your step” have been echoing in my head for years. Those words and many more in the same tone have been what stopped me from sharing these thoughts before.
So what has changed?
I have been journaling most mornings for nearly 15 years. I have been walking about with my camera and trying to connect with the landscape and its wildlife for a dozen. Gradually, my morning musings became praying on paper. I would pour out questions, confusions, frustrations, fears, anxieties, worries, sorrows—along with joys and gratitude. My photographic quests gradually became less about seeking the next great marketable sunrise and more about walking in meditation, asking to be led to the images meant for me to experience and share. And with those shifts came a corresponding shift in experience: my questions on paper began to be met with answers, gentle whispers that I began to anticipate and then to expect. My photographic excursions began to reveal nuances of light or encounters with animals or birds that I would have missed, if not for sensing gentle nudges to go here, or there, or to wait for…something. Something Other. Something Beyond. Something beyond my impatience, my confusion, my anxious stress. I found two oases of calm: my morning praying-on-paper and my walking times of prayer with camera in hand. Why should I have been surprised at the idea of a God Who delights to answer prayer, Who wants to communicate with His children?
Ultimately, that realization is what finally propelled me to go public with all these thoughts. God does delight to answer prayer. God does want to communicate with His children. I am merely one example of the kind of relationship God longs to have with, simply, everyone.
So the goal of this blog isn’t for you, dear reader, to think of me as some sort of prophet, or as someone with a special pipeline to God. The goal is to think, if Eve can hear this kind of guidance and have this kind of one-on-one relationship with the Divine, then why can’t I?
You see, at some point, I decided that very thing myself: why can’t I? And I am here, hearing, to say: yes, you can. It is my hope and prayer that these words, as inspiring as they may be on their own, do the greater work of inspiring you to find your own special connection to God.
For now we see as through a glass, dimly, but then, face to face. 1 Cor. 13:12