Roots

I love being behind the camera ... I love when God speaks ... and I love when He bestows gentle revelations - though they are not, I'm learning, usually immediate. 

The most rewarding photography for me is often when I can take something one would quickly overlook and shed a new light on it. But as far as I am concerned, it's an aesthetic experience. You think your eyes are open when you are capturing ...  until your spiritual eyes are awakened and you're enlightened to something deeper.

It's not the most exciting picture. Tree roots... But yet I was drawn to it. What made these roots so compelling to me was that they were captured in Germany in the Alp Mountain side near Schloss Neuschwanstein. What it spoke to me many months later was even more profound.

It illustrates greatly that life and roots can be planted despite (and even) in those "hard" places [people's experiences]. It's the cracks or brokenness that people feel that become the essential places where God's love can come in and take root; bring life and flourish ... despite the craggy environment. 

I know the image is a little chaotic looking, but there is so much life in that chaos! When you think of it being in a hard mountainside, it's encouraging to know there is no place that God can not come and breathe the fullness of an abundant life!

Trees in and of themselves are quite intriguing when you think of how they grow and are formed. 

Our home and property are towered by a fortress of massive trees. I am both in awe and frightened by them. 

Our trees were fairly neglected long before we arrived. Most of them are in a very sad state. But I can't help and look upon them in awe as I travel down the road. They are some of the tallest in the area and I wonder what stories they would tell from all the years they have stood strong and against all they have faced. I look on our trees, established and mighty, and can't help but envision that a promise or sign to us from the Lord.

Storms have come and battered them ... many times. And I often look at them in fear as I envision those towering over our home crumbling beneath the weight of the winds, me trapped inside. But time and time again, they stand mighty and faithful. Shaken, but not moved ... Branches (sometimes entire limbs) have fallen leaving our yard in a complete disarray. But they provide such a beautiful parable of life and death. 

 The dead branches when not tended to, like the dead things in our life, decay at the overall health and wellness of the tree. Storms are one way the process of pruning can happen naturally to strip away those things that should not be. Sometimes the storms we face in life are doing the same thing in us. We bend and sway, but if our roots are planted deep, we will not be moved.

Roots. They are made up of massive and thick and tiny and fragile parts - one no more important than the other; creating a sure foundation beneath the surface. God often is working all these parts we can not see together in our lives beneath the surface too so that we can stand strong when the storms of life come. And though we may blow to and frow,  being pruned in the process, we will not be shaken. 

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