(You should follow me. I'll follow you back. It'll be great.)
Instagram is an amazing place, full of fascinating people doing remarkable things. It's a feast for the eyes, and it makes me glad to be human.
If you're not careful, though, it can also become a place of envy.
Getting behind the camera helps with this.
(Producing art helps with most things!)
Photography is the art of focus and framing. Always, always, there is something else you could have focused on. Usually, there's some kind of mess lurking just outside of the frame, as well as spectacular beauties that will have to wait for some other picture.
In this fallen world, we are surrounded by brokenness, ugliness, and pain. Pain is violent, forcing itself upon us, whether we are ready or not, and the more we flinch away from it, the more powerful it becomes.
Joy, on the other hand, is gentle. It will never force itself onto your consciousness. It simply waits, quietly hidden. Sometimes it is easy to find, and sometimes it takes quite a lot of searching. When you do find it, it offers up the strength to face pain with a full and open heart, and sometimes even to transform it.
The times when you have to look the hardest for joy are the times when you need it the most.
The flood of picture-perfect images on instagram is not evidence that everyone else has a better life than you. Rather, it is evidence that joy is worth finding and framing: in their life, in my life, and in yours.
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