He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. – Ecclesiastes 3:11-13

Today’s “Photo Friday” gallery is a fairly random selection of images from the week. That’s not unusual, because the point of this weekly collection of photographs is – typically – to highlight interesting pictures that did not make it into any posts over the past seven days.

What’s different this time is that I don’t seem to be able to string them together with a common thread. But maybe that is the thread, the fact that not everything needs a unifying narrative to be meaningful. Maybe sometimes it’s simply the fact that we are, that every day we wake up and we engage with life and stuff happens, and we deal with it.

To be – the simple fact that “we are”

Maybe the meaning is not so much in the day to day events themselves, maybe the meaning is in how we approach them, how we respond?

So Rebekah opens her coffee themed Mother’s Day gift from Naomi (1), and I make her the perfect Mother’s Day hamburger (2), and she pulls out her wedding dress (3) to send to our niece – it was also her mother’s in 1947, and a state of the art carillon is installed at our church (4), and we enjoy a beautiful afternoon reading on the porch (5 and 6), and at church they make a display of my photographs from Arts in the Garden (7) and – finally – (8 and 9) I enjoy another morning walk with Max where I watch the deer play and the trees continue to grow.

The thread of continuity is that most basic of verbs, “to be.” Is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been.

And sometimes, just knowing the “I am” fact of my existence, and the “we are” truth of being together is enough.

Grateful for every new day – DEREK