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Tuesday, November 22, 2011

"all I've got is a photograph, but it's not enough..." - Def Leppard

I spent most of my summer working for an online dating website while managing to stay single. That deserves some sort of recognition, I think.  I came away from this job with two things: a disgust for online dating and a whole lot of stories about weird online daters.
But that isn't the reason that I am posting today. This post comes about because of a picture I had to approve. Oh, did I mention that the best part of my job was approving the pictures people try and post on the site? Well it was. I saw all sorts of awful and great things. The picture I'm referring to was both awful and great at the same time. Sort of like a pizza milkshake.
So there I was on a bright summer's afternoon just clicking through the pics and making sure they were appropriate for a christian-oriented dating site, when a picture of a middle-aged man in a tuxedo came across the screen. There wasn't anything about his appearance that stood out to me. It was his caption: "I wish I would have smiled."
The man in the picture struck me as the kind of man that wouldn't put a whole lot of thought into captioning his photos. In fact I am willing to bet a Jamocha shake from Arby's that it was the first thing that came to his mind. His face in the picture wasn't angry, but he didn't look happy either. I have to imagine that he is a happy person in general, just because I doubt that angry people regret not smiling in pics.
So there I sat on a bright summer's afternoon, with my mind occupied all of a sudden with a bunch of questions. Why regret a non-existent smile? Would he still regret that smile never happening if the picture was never taken? Is it the picture that makes the moment matter?

Then I started to wax poetic and began imagining God developing film from his Nikon SLR Justice & Mercy edition with an Eternal Zoom lens [not an actual camera] and posting them up on some giant wall in Heaven. What would my captions be like? Probably a little more serious than I wish I would have smiled.
I know that a couple of mine would read like this: I wish I would have laughed. I wish I would have called that girl. I wish I would have cried. I wish I would have prayed. I wish I would have lived.  I wish I would have just told the truth. I wish I would have spoken, even when not spoken to. I wish I would have been myself.

Well, if God really does have a Nikon SLR Justice & Mercy with Eternal Zoom then there are gonna be a lot of pics up on that wall that I will wish I could un-tag myself from. Except I doubt Heaven has an 'un-tag' button.