I Keep Taking Pictures To Compare

There are a lot of pictures.

Same angle, same light if you can manage it, same distance. You started because you wanted to be sure you were not imagining it, and that was reasonable. One picture on Sunday, one the following Sunday, and you could tell.

Then it became every few days. Then every morning.

And now there is a small archive of one pot in your phone, and you go back through it at night, swiping between the eleventh and the fourteenth, trying to see whether the difference is real or whether it is the light.

That is where I want to start, and it is not with the plant.

The photographs have stopped being a record. They have become the thing you do instead of feeling something.

Which of you by taking thought

Jesus asks a question in Matthew that lands exactly on this, and it is a question rather than an instruction.

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? (Matthew 6:27, King James Version)

Which of you by taking thought.

You are doing something with enormous effort that changes nothing at all, and that has never once been a sign that you do not care enough. Matthew 6:27 asks the question rather than issuing a rule, and the Holy Spirit is the one who asks it gently over somebody swiping between two pictures at midnight.

Notice the word thought. Not worry, in the old sense of fretting. Taking thought is closer to taking measures. It is the anxious management of a thing, the going over of it, the running of numbers.

And the question exposes the mechanism. Not: is it wrong to take thought. Not: are you a bad person for taking thought. But simply, what does it produce.

One cubit. About eighteen inches. Jesus picks a specific and almost absurd amount, and the answer everybody in the crowd gives silently is: none of us. Nobody has ever added anything to themselves by going over it.

You have been spending real effort on a thing that cannot be moved by effort, and no amount of that has ever once been counted as wasted love. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates the caring from the measuring, and it stands written in Matthew 6 that the measuring adds nothing.

What the archive is actually doing

Now the practical half.

A photograph of a plant on a windowsill is not evidence of much. Light changes hour to hour and day to day, a phone corrects for it differently every time, and the angle is never quite the same however carefully it is done. Two pictures three days apart can show a difference that is entirely the weather.

So the archive cannot answer the question it was built to answer. It is too noisy. A person looking at eleven photographs of one pot is looking at eleven different lighting conditions.

But that is not the real problem, and I want to be honest about the real problem.

You are looking for certainty in a place that does not hold any, and no picture on that phone has ever once been able to give you the answer you are asking it for. What is written in Matthew 6:27 says taking thought adds nothing to a man, and the Spirit of God is the one who says it kindly rather than as a rebuke.

Here is the real problem. Looking at a picture is safer than looking at the plant.

A photograph is a managed encounter. It is flat, it is at arm's length, you can zoom and compare and analyze, and the whole time there is something to do rather than standing in front of a living thing that is going and feeling what that is like.

That is not cowardice. That is what people do. We reach for the measurable when the actual thing is too much, and a phone is very good at turning grief into a data problem.

You were never meant to hold a hard thing at arm's length forever, and reaching for the measurable has never once made you shallow. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows exactly why the camera came out, and Matthew 6 is where the written word names the whole activity for what it is.

One minute of looking

So the replacement for the photograph is not nothing. It is the thing the photograph was standing in for.

Look at it. Actually look at it. For one minute, with the phone somewhere else.

That is much harder than it sounds, and it will feel like a waste of a minute, and about twenty seconds in something will come up that the archive has been keeping at a distance. That is the point. That is what the minute is for.

You are able to stand in front of a hard thing for sixty seconds, and the twenty second mark has never once been more than you could carry. The Spirit of God is the one standing there for the whole minute, and it is written in Matthew 6:27 that the going over of it adds nothing anyway.

Something may surface that is sadness. Something may surface that is anger about the effort. Or nothing may surface at all, and there is a pot in a window on a Tuesday, and that is a perfectly good outcome too.

What you will not find is a measurement, and that is the whole gain.

You are allowed to stand in front of it without producing anything, and one unrecorded minute has never once been time you failed to use. Matthew 6:27 asks what the taking of thought adds, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an unproductive minute bearable.