This week, posting vacation photos and rolling out my usual litany of praise for the wonderful work God did in creating North Carolina, my friend Stephanie pointed out that I am “a terrific spokesperson for (the state).”

Yes, I do love to promote the unique blessing of living somewhere this beautiful. But it’s also true that Rebekah and have always tried to live out our belief that, “One of the best gifts you can give to a community is to make the decision to love it.”

Love is very much a choice, and over the years we have found ourselves around too many people who complained that they were not somewhere else. So, we love North Carolina – and in particular Wake Forest – both because this is a wonderful place to live and because we choose, every day, to be grateful and to love where we are.

Photographing Wake Forest:

Driving up North Main last week, through the heart of the historic district on our way to Joyner Park, I commented to Rebekah that I have photographed the street in the springtime, but never during the summer. The world looks entirely different with literally trillions of leaves in every shot!

So I spent a couple of hours doing just that Thursday morning. I parked at the corner of Main and Walnut then walked north to the edge of the historic district, south all the way to the seminary, then back to where I started.

I took a lot of photographs, featuring the beautiful homes, the trees, the avenue, the walkways, and the landscaping. If you are a homeowner and I didn’t feature your property it’s simply because the elevation, or the lighting, or something else incidental did not work for me in that moment.

I tried to include a lot of non-traditional ways of framing my pictures, especially using the abundance of trees and leaves. It was also garbage pick-up day, so I had to work around the trash cans.  But mostly I clicked when the photograph looked right and I moved on if it didn’t.

One thing that struck me is how much land many of the homes have around them. We are in the heart of Wake Forest yet some of these photographs will make you swear I was hiking out in the country.

I once told someone that a blog should feature less than ten photographs or it begins to feel crowded. Well I’m going to include around 70 in the slide-show at the end! All I can say is “Take a few minutes to run through, I believe you will enjoy them all!”

I did intend to grab some images around the seminary campus too, but ran out of time. So I just shot some of the sunflowers from the street and will save that expedition for another day.

Enjoy these pictures. And – yes – I am bullish when it comes to this community. Wake Forest really is a wonderful place to live.

In gratitude – DEREK