I took this photo above from a painting that one of the kids in Uganda painted at Bethany Village Orphanage, and it just reminded me of this poem written by the Puritans around the time of World War I (1918). I found this poem from a collection of files I put together several years ago. I just love how the poem, the painting, and it’s painter go together so well.
The Valley of Vision
Lord, High and Holy, Meek and Lowly,
You have brought me to the valley of vision,
where I live in the depths but see you in the heights;
hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold your glory.Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from deepest wells,
and the deeper the wells the brighter your stars shine;Let me find your light in my darkness,
your life in my death,
your joy in my sorrow,
your grace in my sin,
your riches in my poverty,
your glory in my valley.Amen
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Well I know we all know down here in the south that the 2011 football season is only a few days away, but after seeing so much posted on the internet about Auburn’s upcoming season I had to go back and look at the last 5 years or so and revisit what I shot through all those games. Every football season is so completely different from the year before, and last year for Auburn was the dream season for those of us who have followed Auburn football for 40 years (like me).
This season will actually be the start of the 40th year of my involvement in Auburn football as a fan. I don’t even know why that is significant in the scheme of things but it just occurred to me as I started looking through all the years of Auburn football images I have now compiled as a photographer and a fan. I was born the day after the Auburn vs Alabama football game in 1970, the last game of the season. Auburn won that game 33-28 at Legion Field in Birmingham. Apparently the only photographer at the game that day was Tod Papageorge, this was about the only image I could find from 1970 but if I can find one of my family from that game I’ll post it tomorrow for Throwback Thursday. Over the next 15 YEARS Auburn would go on to lose the Iron Bowl 12 times going into the mid-80′s when Bo Jackson would then step on the scene. The one historical event coming in 1972 with the “Punt Bama Punt” game where Auburn won 17-16.
Below are outtakes from the last five years. One shot from each season, starting with Gene Chizik going through Tiger Walk from 2010 down to 2006 when we were on the field for pre-game warmup. These are shots that never made it to my blog or use anywhere else, just a few random shots I found from the last five years. Can’t wait for the start of the 2011 season, it’s always a fun time of year down in the south.
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Don’t know how your week has been but my week has been so busy that today was the first day I actually had a chance to get these photos posted from my shoot last weekend.
I love doing a photowalk through local graveyards. Here in Alabama (and I guess everywhere) we have these small family graveyards dotted all around the area. Each one tells an incredible story, and the stories often span a historical period of hundreds of years. This may sound strange to some but they are almost always quiet, peaceful places where traffic is light and little has changed over the decades and time just seems to slow down when you walk through.
This graveyard is real close to my house and is typical of the local family graveyards around our area. There are almost as many infants, babies, and youth in this spot as there are adults. Most of the smallest graves are unmarked and very old at this point. The earliest birth year here was late 1600′s so this little tract has been in this one family, sitting just like this, for over 300 years. There are a lot of houses in our area that were built around the Civil War era, and this spot has a tiny little building/house/shack on it. I try to image who would have lived in this little building, which is smaller than the smallest room in my house.
Each one is different, each one tells a different story.
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I am glad we still celebrate Memorial Day in this country. Somehow it seems that as the political correctness of our culture takes over everything we end up loosing an understanding of what made this country great in the first place. It sickens me to see stories like the one of the Iraq veteran who displayed the American flag in his apartment window and was told to take it down or face eviction due to the fact that the flag is offensive to some of their residents.
Charlie Price of Wisconsin served 8 years for his country in Iraq and Kosovo to find that he isn’t even allowed to fly the flag he fought for in his own window. The couple is now fighting to amend the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 to include renters, and I hope they are successful. Sometimes it seems that you are no longer aloud to hold an opinion in this country because it might offend someone. Who are these idiots who have now decided that we need to be a country of brown plain-jane, average, robots, who all believe in the same thing and can never disagree with anyone else?
There is no greatness in average, no conviction of ideals or principles in living a life of medium gray, and these types always seem to get the headlines. It gets tiring to hear the moaners, whiners, and complainers beat the drums of complacency and strive towards moving the country to be average, but sometimes they seems to be yelling the loudest. Now, instead of being the innovators and inventors, we are having to rely on Russia and Russian built rockets to take us into space, who would have thought that 20 years ago.
It is still the greatest country in the world, I just wish some of it’s residents would take a history lesson and see that America was not built on being average. The History Channel just finished an interesting series called America The Story of Us. Though some of it was a little subjective, it showed the overwhelming story of how much innovation, determination, and sacrifice people made because they believed in themselves and what this country stood for.
My family has had people who fought in the Civil War, WWI, both of my grandfathers served in WWI (see Son of a Son of a Photographer), one flew a B-24 Bomber in WWII in Europe, my dad served in the Air Force, and my cousin decided to go into the Navy after 9-11 and is currently serving in the Navy on a nuclear submarine. I am thankful for their service to this country. Because they served, my wife and I are able to enjoy living in this great country.
I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day. It has been quite a stormy weekend with some crazy weather but I managed to get outside and take a few photos (and some of the dog of course). The heat is definitely on its way, the pasture, trees, and everything around has taken on the brilliant green of summer.
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I love this quoted poem below. You probably won’t appreciate it unless you are a ham radio operator or understand the language but if you do, it’s quite something.
In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network
and ARPA said, ‘Let there be a protocol,’ and there was a protocol.
And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more protocols,’ and it was so.
And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, ‘Let there be more networks,’ and it was so.
http://www.computerhistory.org/internet_history/
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A few weeks ago when I was in Atlanta for Catalyst I went to a blogger-ish meeting that took place after Catalyst had ended, called Off the Blogs (photos of that night). During one of the sessions, Carlos Whittaker from Ragamuffinsoul talked to the group about things going on in his life, and he mentioned a book he was reading that I had never heard of before, called Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron.
I am struggling with finding words to review this book adequately as it really took me to another place in how I think about God, the traditions of the Church as seen from a historical perspective, and the local modern church of today. Where I am part of the local modern church today by the mere fact that I am alive in 2009, Chasing Francis took me back to the traditions in the church during the 1200′s when Saint Francis of Assisi was alive. It got me to more closely examine the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7, and it was loaded with things we can apply to church today that Francis championed some 800 years ago.
This book is an allegory of sorts and it mixes fact and fiction throughout as Chase (the main character) goes on a pilgrimage that follows the life of Saint Francis of Assisi after he has been told by the elders to take a leave of absence as Pastor of a modern contemporary church to think about its direction. I tried to read the book with an open mind, not necessarily a critical mind, and it gave me a better appreciation for the roots of the Catholic church (which really are the roots to THE church), and the labels we tend to apply to everything in our world today.
Our Protestant-Catholic Misconceptions
Growing up Protestant the misconceptions and exaggerations I had/have of the Catholic church is probably similar to most in a denominational type church, but the story did focus on a Catholic Saint, and I found this passage very telling:
…My initiation into conservative Christianity included being taught that Catholics weren’t really ‘saved.’…
“What do you want to talk about?” Kenny said. “Transubstantiation, sola Scriptura versus the magisterium, praying to Mary, or all the other stuff Catholics and Protestants get hung up on? I’m too old for that. I’d rather be a reverent agnostic.”“You’re an agnostic?” I asked. “The word agnostic means ‘not knowing.’ There are countless mysteries that I have to say… ‘I don’t know’.
and he went on to put the differences to rest as far as the story in this book goes to say:
…no one tradition has a corner on the faith market. Sharing the wisdom each of our traditions brings to the table will create more well-rounded Christians. Francis was a Catholic, evangelical preacher, radical social activist, devoted to prayer… who worshiped with all the enthusiasm of a Pentecostal.
and that is how he started down his pilgrimage into the life of Francis. I started off with zero knowledge about this Believer who lived 800 years ago, but left with a great curiosity to learn more.
Chasing Francis may have been written as a work of fiction, but the principles will ring true with any of us caught in the modern life of iPhone’s, Twitter, Facebook, and trying to be connected to the newest latest greatest, and then trying to bring it into the church.
For me, our methods in the church today in 2009 are different, our tools are different, and our words we use are different than any other time in history. We reach out to people in different ways than ever before, but we also don’t need to ignore the history and traditions of the church (minus the time frame in which our 66 books were written), and only look to the future. There are many who have come before us that have a lot to teach us, if we reach out to them.
Top 10 Bullet Points from Chasing Francis
Here are a few of the bullet points I took away from Chasing Francis. I scribbled, wrote, highlighted, and underlined half the book, so these are just a few of the ones that stuck out to me.
- the Bible is less about ideas or doctrines than it is a story about people and their up-and-down relationship with God
- the Bible is more a painting than a photograph [in context of interpretation of a painting]
- postmoderns are good at criticizing the old way of doing things, but not very good at offering up positive alternatives for going forward
- Francis didn’t criticize the institutional church, nor did he settle for doing church the way it had always been done
- when did I loose the childlike ability to hear God in nature?
- I’m not a character in search of an Author; I have a story.
- possessions dissipate the energy which they need for other and more real things
- Labels are misleading. They objectify people. They are a form of relational laziness
- come and see how we preach the gospel at all times and when necessary, use words
- if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.
In the end, I would say this is a must read, but only if it could be read with an open mind to think about the fact that there may be other ways to exercise our faith that we may disagree with, but that doesn’t make them wrong. It challenged by thinking and I loved the book. I will leave this post with one of my favorite quotes in the book from Henry David Thoreau.
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. – Thoreau
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This morning Amazon released the new Kindle iPhone App, or an iPhone eBook reader. Since I do not yet (but probably will soon) have a Kindle the news of the Kindle iPhone app was really intriguing, but I started wondering if the app was putting the horse before the cart. The very first reaction on the Internet was people saying they were disappointed they bought the Kindle and now they can get this on their iPhone. Totally wrong way to look at it altogether. What Amazon did by making an iPhone app for the Kindle was make their product more relevant and more useful than it was last week.
I won’t go through a comparison between the two, there is a great review over on CNET, see Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle’s iPhone app, but one of the great features is being able to read a book between the two devices. It doesn’t come quite as close as Seth Godin’s request in Reinventing the Kindle (part II) to share books between Kindle users, but it comes closer. If Amazon keeps going down this road they will really make the Kindle a breakthrough device.
Breakthrough in the same way the iPod was for music, the Kindle can potentially be for books. Everyone grumbled about the price of the iPod, and it took until the 2nd generation for me to plunk down the money for one, but after a while, people realized that the iPod revolutionized the way we listen to music. There will always be people who want to read on paper, but for many, paper is a hassle, uses trees, and culturally is on the same track and path as Kodak 400 speed print film, but it’s more than just that. Don’t blink, traditional media is going fast, and in some cases pretty much gone.
- Photography – Print Film —> Digital (almost totally complete at this point)
- Music – Vinyl –> Tapes –> CD –> Digital (niche markets for anything non-digital)
- Movies – Film –> Tape –> DVD –> Download (slower but almost there)
- TV – Tube –> Cable –> Satellite –> Streaming Live (computer only is coming)
- Books – Paper –> eBooks / Digital (the slowest of the 4, but catching up)
- Magazines / Newspapers –> Paper –> Digital (totally dying media in paper form)
My wife is currently working on her Master’s degree and last semester she spent something like $300-$400 on books. After the Kindle 2 came out, I started looking at which books she bought were available on the Kindle. About 30-40% of them are currently available, at $9.99-$15. She paid $40-$50 for some of these books which can now be downloaded on the Kindle for $10. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out the savings potential for College students all over the world, and seeing that Amazon is working on things like iPhone Apps is only going to make the Kindle more and more relevant in our society’s future.
Sometimes we go kicking and screaming into the future, and change comes with a fight. The Kindle / iPhone app is a great example of a transition of all forms of media to digital, it’s just a question of how long will we hold on to the past print mediums because that is what we are use to today.
Update March 2011
I have since written an update to this post in light of the iPad, which makes eBooks even more appealing, you can read that posts Printed Books vs iPad or Kindle eBooks and the Future of Books
