You know those times in your life when your growing up and you want to be a fireman, or a police officer or something really cool? Looking back now I can tell you how my passion for photography had begun....When I was in the 6th grade I went to Willamette Valley Christian School in Brooks Or. I had the "privilege" to clean the school with my dad for my tuition to go there...(Thanks Dad) Well, everyday I would have 2 potholes that would sometimes detour me from completing my job in a timely manner...(that I can remember). The first one was basketball...I loved basketball, I would spend all the time I could working on my skills for the playground and the small team that I played on...(Little known fact, I was going to the NBA to be one of the shortest white guys to ever play...) I got in trouble many times for shooting hoops and not vacuuming...at one point I had some teachers convinced I had a twin brother named Eugene that would play basketball once in a while. It worked for a week...
The other pothole was the huge library of National Geographic Magazine just down the hallway across from the 2nd, and 3rd graders classroom. I could easily vacuum up to a certain point and then my eye would catch the binding of the yellow frame...sometimes it would be a white frame, that just meant that it was an older magazine...It had to of been my goal to look through every single magazine they had there...I was obsessed...I loved the pictures and how different all the people were around the world...people sticking knives through their face, blood pouring into their mouth almost choking them...or the “real cowboys” riding the plains of the west, sleeping next to their horses and staring at the stars all night. Maybe it was the the beautiful landscape photography that would somehow draw my eyes into the whole scene and so I could notice every color that was painted on to a very life like canvas....then again it could have also been seeing pain of a photograph taken of a woman crying with her limp lifeless body of her son in her arms...This stuff is real and its happening everyday we exist...This all seem so artsy and vague as I write it but thats truly how I felt looking at the pictures....some pictures I would go back to and others I knew to avoid but one thing I knew is I saw photos that I wanted to someday find.
This dream was quickly forgotten even after I knew I wasn’t going into the NBA but one day I decided I wanted to try out photography...and the rest is history...I still suck at being a photographer and I am way to comfortable at 1/15th of a second or less...I push my iso an long gone are the days of pushing my film speed...even in those days I would shoot with 3200 speed cause I could never seem to find enough light for my un tripoded shaky hands....I am the worst mix of photographer you can have...but I kept on shooting, spent hundreds of dollars (thanks again Mom and Dad) on film just so I could practice...
Fast Forward a few years to now...here I am living my dream...I just got back from Brazil where I went down there and I asked Jesus to move and to do things in my life cause I was tired of maintaining...The opportunity of going out to the tribe came up and when I was on the 5-6 hour boat ride up river to the tribe I realized this one truth-
...God didn’t forget that little boys dreams...
Yeah, I have had a lot of “life” happen in between now and then, decisions that changed the course of even where I am at now...but God didn’t forget. Of all the people I worked with down in Brazil there was one woman who has been translating the Bible for a tribe over the last 40+ years! Just the few minutes I spent with her I realized that she and her late husband were the people that I prayed for when I was a little kid...She and her husband were the faceless, nameless people that had been in the NGS Magazine September 1971 where they documented the first contact of a tribe they didn’t even know existed yet...and that is when it hit me in my face....God won’t forget our dreams...
So, I am compelled to ask, what are your dreams, silly ideas, or out right stupid concepts? Where was it birthed? When? Why would you even think something like that? I think God has given us dreams and stupid ideas for a reason (to a certain extent) and someday he will reach down and mess up the dirt in our heart and pull out something that we have totally forgotten about....I challenge you to dream big, go for it, sometimes it won’t make sense but trust this Jesus guy...he is kind of smart...
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