Our twenty-three-month-old has become entranced with the camera function on our phones. She hasn’t quite mastered how to capture what she is trying to…or has she? I couldn’t help but smile as I looked at these portraits and peeks into her world. There were a lot of pictures of people’s knees and a lot of pictures where things were blocked because of chairs or furniture, which just happens to be her height right now.
As I looked, I began to understand why she cried, “Mommy, up!” with such urgency. She wanted to be up so she could see what we were seeing. She wanted to be up so she could be face-to-face with us. There’s a passage in 1 Corinthians right after the well-known “love passage” that says: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” She is only seeing part of the world, but she is discovering that there is more to see and that if she asks she can see better and more clearly when she is, “Up!” or when she captures something with a camera.
I think if we are open to it, we, too, get these moments where we see more clearly what life is about. There are these moments where this reality slows down, almost to slow motion, and we see clearly that we are supposed to not live for ourselves or chase after fame and money. Instead, when we are fully present here and now, we see the beauty of life all around us and the true miracle of being here together. In those moments, you can’t help but “cheese” because it really is extraordinary this living and being in this wild and wonderful world.