I Deleted Myself From the Pictures

You have a line you use, and it works every time.

I hate being in pictures. Nobody argues with that. It is the most ordinary sentence in the world and half the men you know would say the same, and so you get handed the camera instead, which suits you, and you are the reason there are so many good photographs of everybody else.

But you and I both know that the line is doing something. It is not that you hate being in pictures. It is that you have been quietly taking yourself out of your own family's history for years, and the line is the door you hold shut while you do it.

The group shot at the reunion where you moved behind your uncle. The vacation you have almost no evidence of attending. The one your wife took at the table that you deleted off the phone before anybody scrolled past it, and then said nothing about, and nobody noticed, and that was the point.

Let me put the first thing where it belongs, which is first. You have not been careless about this. Not for a second. You have been dealing with it, on your own, for most of your life, and you have tried more things than you would ever list out loud. A man who did not care would be in every photograph and would not have thought about it once. The care is not the thing that has been missing. The care is what built the whole apparatus.

So I am not going to give you an assignment about photographs. And I am not going to tell you that you look fine, because that is not mine to say and it would not touch this anyway.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to tell you about somebody in the Bible who was seen at a distance, before he had arranged anything, and what happened next.

What a missing man costs a family

Here is the part that does not occur to a man while he is doing it.

It has felt all along as though the photographs were about you. They are not. A photograph is about the people who will look at it later. And what your children will have, thirty years from now, is a shelf of pictures of a family with a man missing out of it, and they will not remember the reason, because the reason was never said out loud.

That is not said to shame you. It is said because it is the one thing the arrangement cost that you were not counting.

You are not an item in a picture, and no photograph has ever once been a record of what you are worth in your own house. Luke 15:20 has a father see his son a long way off and run, before a word was said and before anything was fixed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a scene like that land on a man holding a phone.

And notice what the hiding actually protects. It does not protect you from what you look like, because you already know that and carry it every day. It protects you from other people knowing that you know. The photograph is dangerous because it is evidence that could be looked at by somebody who might then say something, and you have decided in advance that they would.

You have been guarding a secret that was never a secret, and no one who loves you has ever once been waiting for a photograph to find you out. The written word says the father saw him while he was yet a great way off, which means the seeing came before the arriving, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that difference matter to a man in his own kitchen.

A long way off

The story is the one everybody knows, and the detail that matters is easy to read past.

But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. (Luke 15:20, King James Version)

He was a great way off. He had not arrived, he had not explained himself, he had not cleaned up, and by his own account in the verses before this he had a speech prepared about how little he deserved.

He never got to give it properly. The father was already running.

You are seen at a distance and before the speech, and there has never once been a version of you that had to arrive first. Luke 15 has the father moving while the son is still on the road, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scene like that and makes it happen to somebody in the present tense.

Read what the father does not do. He does not wait at the gate to see what state the boy is in. He does not look him over. There is no inspection anywhere in that story, and if there had been, the son's speech would have been necessary.

You were run toward, and no inspection has ever once been part of how God comes to a man. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that a felt thing rather than a doctrine held at arm's length, and Luke 15 is the written word where a father sees a long way off and does not wait to be sure.

Somebody has the whole record

Now the part I came to say, and it is about who is keeping the album.

The history in your house has been curated. Out of the group shots, gone from the table, and the result is that the record in your house has holes in it that match the shape of you exactly. And somewhere underneath that is an assumption that has never been examined: that the record in your house is the record.

It is not. There is a complete one. Every year you have no evidence of, every trip you appear in nowhere, every ordinary evening at the table you removed yourself from, has been seen and kept by somebody who was in the room and did not need a camera.

You are not missing from anything, and nothing you deleted has ever once been lost. The written word says the father saw him a long way off, which is a sentence about the reliability of God's attention, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it plain that the keeping was never dependent on the keeping of photographs.

That is worth sitting with for a second. The years you feel you were absent from your own family, you were not absent from. You were there. Somebody has all of it, in full, and there is no gap in His copy where you edited yourself out of ours.

You have been present the whole time, and no deletion has ever once removed a man from the account God keeps. The Spirit of God is the one who says that to a man in his own house, and Luke 15 is the written word where the father's eyes are on the road long before there is anything to see.