ME Week—Monday

Well, I’ve been waiting on this week for a while now. It’s ME week! Not in the personal pronoun sense but in the Mary Elizabeth sense. 

I’ve waited till this week to do it because, for the first time in a very long time, she’s the only one of our kids home all week, and she’s leaving for college next month. Wow.

This is the first digital picture I took of her—possibly her very first breakfast in bed at two years old. I’ve taken tens of thousands of pictures since this one. One of the things I love about my daughter is that she loves photography, too. A couple of days ago, we went for a drive in the mountains to get breakfast and also to show her a place that I knew she’d love to see near Valle Crucis, NC. She took some pictures with her phone. Then we stopped in a couple of shops and headed back to where we were staying.

When we got back, I realized that I should’ve taken some pictures of us having that time together. I think more about that as the “days till college” countdown gets smaller.

But then I realized that not every memory has to have a picture. Some memories are just part of you and you don’t need the photo to go with it. 

I’m glad I took this picture of Mary Liz getting breakfast in bed, because I’d forget about that moment without the picture. But the drive we took two days ago... that I won’t forget: just a dad and his grown-up daughter sharing life together in a beautiful place.

Ansel Adams once said, “Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.” 

I think that sometimes the shutter is on a physical camera. But sometimes—even in a world full of six second videos and iPhone pictures—the shutter is simply in our hearts and our heads. Mary Liz and I had that kind of morning a few days ago. My prayer is that we’ll have many, many more of those. . . with or without cameras.