To the Moon & Back Photography: What A Sunday

Church service was good this morning. Grant, a fellow colleague whom I've known since elementary school, gave the sermon this morning. He's interning under our senior Pastor... He's grown so much since I've known him that it makes me forget he's younger than me. He gave a lesson on faith. I've always known faith to having belief in things you can't see, particularly, God... and as Grant was introducing his topic, The Kry's "Take My Hand" song came to mind: "Faith is to be sure of what you hope for in the evidence of things not seen". And though I grew up in a Christian home, I needed that lesson on faith again for the umpteenth time.

This week I've been struggling with being productive mentally. I wanted to be busy to keep my mind off things that I've been dealing with. I did A LOT of editing on my pictures and even looked up old photos to edit now that I have Apple's great editing software, Aperture (LOVE it, by the way). I did a pretty good job at keeping my mind busy for the most part to avoid issues I wanted to keep at bay. I kept thinking and day dreaming of other things I could do, and it mainly worked. But I knew I wasn't satisfied; I had the icky feeling of knowing I'm going to have to deal with this sooner or later.

Grant's message reminded me of what faith is and isn't. It was credited to us as righteousness; though we don't deserve such righteousness, we did... even in our most unrighteousness. Faith needs to be cultivated because faith is dead without actions. James 2:22 speaks of faith as a lifestyle and obeys and responds to the commandments of Him whom we faith in. Though I thought I was keeping busy, I wasn't productive with my time as much as I could have been; in a very selfish way, I still wanted to wallow in my self pity and continue to keep my issues instead of letting them go. But the driving point of his sermon? Faith isn't lazy. I have kinda big problems in this area. I'm not lazy in the way that I do nothing. I just don't put much effort into "faithing". I just kinda let it be and go with the flow of things, but I've come to believe that allowing things to flow isn't having faith that everything will be ok. I tend to worry, stress, and lower my self-esteem while I'm in the process of something.

I sat on that for a bit earlier tonight as I was folding my overdue laundry on the "to-do" list.

So my epiphany came to me: I need to put some effort into my faith and actually faith through a knowledge of redemption, love, and hope.

I know Christianity seems like such an unpopular "category" to be placed in nowdays, but I'm taking the name and going to strive to make it what it is.... not what the label entails as it has from the surface... and I can only pray to genuinely show the relevance of it from here on out, that its not another categorized religion but a lifestyle =]

Anyhow, I don't have a great transition into this next section at all because I am mainly exhausted but here's a change of pace of blogging...

Pictures! Like I said, I did A LOT of editing. Mostly couple pictures. The more I edited, the more I fell in love with them. =] And yes, they are from the previous shoots, so I hope you're not too bored with them just yet..... And hopefully I'll have newer ones up in the next week or two to come!

Here are my favs.... Enjoy!