This morning, I took a stroll up my street to the pond at the top of the hill. The pavement beneath my bare feet was as cool as the air blowing through my thick head of unbrushed hair. I planted myself in the dewy grass by the water’s edge where I slowly thumbed through the crisp pages of my flimsy Bible. I struggled to remember the last time I’d felt those pages between my fingers. As the warm, summer sun slowly peeked its way through the clouds; I sat silent, listening to the chirping of birds in the distance.

My heart began to remember the familiar words of Psalm 143, scripted in pencil on my bedroom wall: “Let me experience your faithful love in the morning, for I trust in you. Reveal to me the way I should go, because I long for you.” But the pondering my heart was doing was quickly interrupted by my thoughts, which were telling me one thing: this moment belongs on Instagram. My people will love this! I thought. If I just adjust my legs to conveniently crop out my dirty feet, then I’ll position my Bible just slightly in the lower corner. If I apply the right filter, my legs will look tan, and the water will look clearer than it really is. I’m definitely thinking Valencia for this one. If only I had an iced coffee, now that would enhance this photo for sure.

I’m so ashamed that I’m actually putting this out here on the internet, because those are actually the thoughts I was thinking this morning, and that’s really embarrassing. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve given in to the interruption of instagram. BUT YOU GUYS – I know I’m not the only one – I just know it. I know that when you have quiet time, you don’t actually clench the handle of your coffee mug for dear life with your freshly manicured fingernails gently resting on the pages of your bible. I doubt that you use that fancy lettering handwriting – the kind in which one word takes up half a page – when you’re journaling for no one else to see. I’m just going to go out on a limb here and guess that your sunglasses, tanning oil, book, towel, and flip flops didn’t all just land in perfect arrangement atop that lawn chair that you’ll sprawl on poolside this afternoon. And maybe, just maybe, you had to reposition yourself in your eno a few times before capturing the perfect shot of your legs and the view, and your friend in their matching eno beside you. And don’t get me started on the editing. Oh my gosh people, I’ve seen you in real life and your eyes are not that blue. You are not fooling me, bro.

How do I know this? Well, it’s because I too have an Instagram, and I am guilty of these very things. Now, I will say that in an age where being “artsy” is the new social media aspiration, I am certainly lacking. Up until yesterday, I was using a very old, glitchy iphone to capture most of my photos. They lacked good lighting and angles, and I as a person lack general photographic talent, so the pictures as a whole were quite sub-par. Yet, even I, have tried to rock this whole “post-awesome-pictures-with-witty-captions” thing and honestly, being on the other side of the Iphone for these moments is hilarious. For example:

This “selfie” I took at work. I had to sneak into my bosses office to take this, because that office has the most windows, and thus, the best lighting. Here, you see me sporting my “new” glasses that were actually several weeks old at the time of this photo, but that was the first day I had worn them. What I failed to mention in my caption is that I’m also sporting a new shirt. I hope you like it.

This is the photo accompaniment to my blog post “Coffee and Christianity: a disjointed post on life.” What you don’t know is that is hot chocolate. I hate coffee. And I never go to Starbucks unless it’s the one 25 minutes from my house where my sister works, because then I get it for free. What you also don’t know is that by the time I found a clean enough section of counter space to take this picture, it was cold chocolate.

This one’s great because don’t ya know that everyone holds things like this? Gotta see that wrist tattoo at all times. Also I had to take this 43 times to get one in which there wasn’t a small child leaping from the diving board.

Oh, and this one is my very favorite, because I spent so much time cleaning my floor for this stinking picture. Those candles took forever to light, my computer kept falling from my strategically positioned blanket, and it’s just deceiving in general, because who am I kidding – I don’t wear pants when I’m in my room alone. So HA. Hahahaha!

Social media is such a strange thing. It’s fun to keep up with people and interact through statuses and pictures, but I think far too often it becomes one of three things: an idol, an identity, or an interruption. All three have been true of me at times, but recently its been the last one. I’ve really had to check my motives lately before posting on social media. I think it’s important that we ask ourselves if we’re posting for likes and validation, out of pride or false humility, or just for fun.

Ironically, this morning, I didn’t have my phone with me. As the wet grass soaked its way through my leggings on this dark, early morning, it was just me, my bible and Jesus, and that was enough. He invited me into His presence in the quiet of the dawn of day, and I heard that gentle whisper that otherwise goes unheard; the one that beseeches me to “be still.”

I walked home this morning without photographic evidence of my picturesque time with Jesus by the pond, but with the thought that just maybe, in our efforts to preserve certain moments, we end up missing them altogether. I wonder how many I’ve missed from behind a screen.

I came away with perspective and felt challenged in this three areas:

•  To seek to live in more moments and capture less
• To share my life through social media with authenticity and humility
• To spend more, uninterrupted time with Jesus

Today, I choose to accept the real, abundant life He has for me; the kind that awaits on the other side of the camera. That life is full of broken people living in a beautiful mess, and sometimes that looks like dirty feet and tired eyes and filthy floors. I think sometimes, the best filter through which we can view our lives is the one that sees the beauty in the ordinary days. Life through a lens of grace makes simple moments stunning and plain moments perfect, because we remember the One who sews them together with mercy and love.

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