Pretty dead things

Posted by Alan Knox on Mar 16, 2011 in discipleship, personal | 2 comments

My daughter, Miranda, loves photography. Currently, she’s taking a photography class, so we often take her to different places around our area so that they can shoot photos. (If you’re interested, you can see some of her photos here. You’ll even find a picture of me.)

The thumbnail attached to this post is one of her pictures. It was taken in Nags Head, NC. I think it’s a beautiful picture. (You can see a larger version of the tree picture here.)

A few days ago, we went to a local “botanical garden” which turned out to be a couple of trails through the woods. While walking the trails, she took pictures of rocks, stumps, and fallen logs, among other things.

Again, many of those pictures are stunning. Currently, my laptop’s desktop background is a photo of a gnarled and twisted stump that she took. The stump has colored striations that are very pretty.

In fact, all of the things that I listed are very pretty: tree, stumps, rocks, fallen logs. But, they have something else in common, too. They’re all dead.

None of them are living. They are beautiful to look at. They have structure and substance. But, they are all dead.

Just something to think about… dead things can be attractive, but they’re still dead.