More Than a Lifetime

More Than a Lifetime

I pick and choose carefully, each step on a smooth stone across the raging river.
Calculated, no missteps.
My reward is the absence of furious water or fighting for breath in unfriendly water.
But I still see.
Ahead of me. The far shore seems barely closer.
Behind me. From where I came, seems so close.
Around me. Others, have leaped like fools from stone to stone so quickly across the river, some dragged into the water and gone, some making it so far ahead they are out of sight.
And what has happened to them?
Have the unfortunate ones drowned? Or is there a different fate available?
The ones out of sight? What promise awaits on the other side? Or does it?
At my current rate, I am not destined to know these answers.

I have so many images in my library, that to show you one every day would mean I must live another 200 years.
I pick and choose carefully.
But careful can become a time when the clock starts to work backwards, while life forges ahead.
Careful can become the tree you hide behind in the woods.
Hiding is the exhaustion I can no longer manage.

An experiment in un-carefulness leads me here, to show you this image.
The most beautiful church in some of the most peaceful woods on earth. To me.
The woods are everything I have wanted for my life.
The church is everything I have wished for my soul.
When I walk through these woods I can feel my aliveness throughout.
When I sit in this church I can feel my soul join the chorus of all souls.
But alas, they only exist together in my mind and now, in this image.
Here I am, showing you and I have much more to reveal, more than a lifetime.

*The church is Christ Church in Old City, Philadelphia. Its beauty is in its simplicity and lack of ornament. The woods are found in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.