Do everything without complaining or arguing so that you will be blameless and pure, children of God without any fault. But you are living with evil people all around you, who have lost their sense of what is right. Among those people you shine like lights in a dark world, and you offer them the teaching that gives life.

Philippians 2:14-16

Sometimes when I see photographs in nature I cringe at how people mess around with the color saturation settings. There is beautiful color, and then there is garish. Nature does beautiful, not lurid and gaudy.

I have to point this out, because the colors here in Wake Forest over the past couple of days have been so bright and showy you may be tempted to believe I manipulated the images in the editing software. But I did not. This is all real, and October is just beautiful around our neighborhood.

I often think about the idea that color does not exist outside of light. The more pure and clear the light, then the more explosively brilliant is the color.

I think that, quite often, we mistakenly try to paint things in certain colors – shades that we prefer – when what we really need to be doing is shining more clearly with a pure light. Light also reveals truth, and clarity. Our job is to allow ourselves to be filled up – saturated – with God’s light and love, and then simply to shine.

And I can’t help but think about that old hymn from when I was a child:

Jesus bids us shine with a clear pure light, like a little candle burning in the night; in this world of darkness we must shine – you in your small corner, and I in mine. (Susan Warner: 1819-1885)

This time last year…

This time last year Rebekah and I were wrapping up our wonderful journey to the south of England. Camber, Rye, Folkestone, Hastings, and the Isle of Wight.

I am tempted to run the entire series of posts over again, but instead I will share a handful of the photographs, and point you to one of the first in my October 2022 travel series – you can navigate from there (“Spectacular UK“).

Talk about splashing around all the rich colors of nature! Look at these fields for example, around Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight! It’s as if they were painted by Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh.

Southeast England is one of the most beautiful places on earth (I may be a little bit biased, as I did grow up there). Just so you understand where I am coming from, I have just chosen a few representative photos.

First – above – Rebekah on our hike to “The Needles” at the western point of the Isle of Wight.

Then, the cultivated fields of “England’s green and pleasant lands…”

Next – left – one of my absolute favorites, with the two of us standing on “Castle Hill” behind Folkestone, just a mile from my house in the community where I grew up. The hills offer views all across the town, the cliffs toward Dover, Romney Marsh to the west, the North Downs behind, and all the way across the channel to France.

Finally, this from our short visit with my dad’s sister Auntie Dorothea, and Uncle John in Hove. Dad died just three weeks later, then Dorothea passed away unexpectedly in the New Year.

This world is a truly amazing gift of color and light and life and promise. May we always be grateful for how we are gifted, every day, with such generous beauty. DEREK

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
(William Blake, 1808)