tension

Sunday, November 1, 2009


A friend whose heart I love asked recently if I am ever torn between writing and photography.

I answer that sometimes I am one, sometimes I am the other - I feel so much, so deeply. I write to express feeling I have that seeks words, write to discover what it is I am thinking. As I write, I become.

It is when I do not feel at all that I go looking for the pictures, stretched like a string on a violin, waiting taut for the stroke of the Master's bow, the touch of His fingers creating melody for the lyric of me. This is when I simply am.

These last few weeks have been picture times, woven in color and gray and white, in glorious simplicity and straightforward complexity that offers no words for becoming, just moments for living.

And I am human, seeming to focus too much here, too little there, on a pendulum swing I can't resist because this is what being means. This is what it is to have a soul that is alive, a Spirit teaching God-acknowledgment and thought-captivity, always searching for evidence of Him placed around me so my glory may be in knowing God, that He is the Lord, exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness on the earth.

I feel nothing and everything at once, and there is too much for me to grasp, so I rest and putter and pause and ponder and wish there were something at once more and less profound so I could define it, me, Him - and get back to what I want to do tomorrow. Yet I am aware there is much I don't know, much I don't understand, much for me to wonder at about His Holy - what do I really know?

Sometimes I confuse settling for rest and put passion away. The daily tired begs for smaller vision; Jesus felt this too, walking dusty through one crowd of expectations into crucified obedience - into which I am called. His Spirit in me seeks that oneness with the Father which He knew, which He prayed for me.

Oh how I begin to understand the unsettled ache of His desire...
God.

Today I am stretched among worlds
I dangle here with my arms between beauty
and capture
and life and art.
The colors of life You have given me
and a world who does not see
and a world who does see.
To left or to right
or to upward or downward,
I decide where to turn
And I don't.
I am stretched out and frozen
And hoping my reach won't exceed
The boundaries of Your dream
for me.
I discover and revel
In glories here
But I don't wish to trade
Your Life
for these that I hold in my hands.

So if You have a purpose
In stretching this heart to claim
All the world for Your own
In words
or in pictures;
In colors to frame
All I can of Your love here in time;
Or in touching a small hand,
And sharing a moment
Uncaptured
But full and alive -
I need grace and elastic
And You to sustain
And seconds and seconds and seconds.
I open my hands
And stretch out these arms
I hold all I can see up to You
to capture
So I can be free

And stretch out my life to hold You.


- A Repost from Dec. 20, 2008





(Image © Informal Moments Photography)

7 comments:

Maureen said...

A beautiful post and an especially beautiful poem, Kelly.

Your gifts are to see and sing with words and in silence to see with an image-eye what is invisible to others, God-given gifts that allow your full expression. They so glorify Him.

Keep writing. Keep taking pictures. You needn't ever make a choice for one over the other when His Spirit is with you.

Candace said...

Beautiful thoughts and words. Thanks for sharing.

Danielle said...

I too, "write to discover what it is I am thinking." I often don't know what I'm thinking until I write it down. It's how I process life, and always have.

I also think I write and do photography as a way of seeing the details of life. Details I might have missed otherwise.

Thanks for sharing . . .

Anonymous said...

"I need grace and elastic"
i love this line!

it makes me think of when i was pregnant with my first child, a hundred years ago. at eight months i tought i could not get any bigger...however, i found out differently.

grace and elastic.

Laura said...

Eloquently said, Kelly. I can't help thinking of all the things that tug and pull...stretching me.

L.L. Barkat said...

So much of life exists in tension.

Yet perhaps that is part of the vitality.

KrystaSolaris said...

Your words are a mirror I see myself in... but I can could never express my feelings like you do.

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