Discovery & Determination

Today is Fri­day and that means that we all made it through another week. Maybe for some of us it was a week of suc­cess and ful­fill­ment. Maybe for oth­ers it was a dif­fi­cult week where most days you were feel­ing like you could barely stay above water. Either way you are here. You made it through. I am look­ing for­ward to a week­end of rest and relax­ation. I had a pretty good week; it had its up and downs. Actu­ally most weeks are like that. But look­ing back at it I real­ize how blessed I am. As we sat together and prayed as a fam­ily last night, I was con­victed about all the silly lit­tle things I com­plain about or get upset about. God has blessed me so much and there is no rea­son for me to com­plain about any­thing. The fact that I can see, hear, talk, and walk is enough to be grate­ful for because there are many peo­ple that don’t have those priv­i­leges. Let’s all take the time today and focus on what we do have instead of what we don’t have. It will make a dif­fer­ence in your life.

As I got ready today to share a sneak pre­view with you, this pic­ture really spoke to me. I am so excited to reveal the rest of this beau­ti­ful lit­tle boy’s fam­ily por­traits but for now I’ll leave you with two. When we took this photo of Colin, he had dis­cov­ered the water foun­tain and was des­per­ately try­ing to turn it on by him­self. How­ever, it was much harder than he expected. Colin has an infat­u­a­tion with water. In fact, that is how we first met him. He heard Vitaliy water­ing the flow­ers so he hap­pily ran into our court­yard to see what was hap­pen­ing. Because we knew this about Colin we wanted to cap­ture this mem­ory for him and his par­ents. This is why we love get­ting to know our clients bet­ter before the photo shoot because it makes a dif­fer­ence in the pho­tos. He really wanted to fig­ure out the water foun­tain for him­self. He was deter­mined. I love the con­cen­tra­tion on his face. It is a mix­ture of dis­cov­ery and cal­cu­la­tion — how can I make this work? It is a beau­ti­ful thing to wit­ness and cap­ture this basic human behav­ior of dis­cov­ery and deter­mi­na­tion. It’s starts when you are young, like Colin here, but does it really stop there?

I am con­stantly still expe­ri­enc­ing these things. I have new dis­cov­er­ies about life, about human deprav­ity, about myself, about pho­tog­ra­phy, about run­ning a busi­ness, or down to some­thing as lit­tle as a new recipe. My real­iza­tion of these things leads me to a fork in the road — will I go to the left and sur­ren­der because its just too dif­fi­cult or will I go to the right and per­se­vere to under­stand­ing? The opti­mism in me and my hope in Jesus always enables me to choose the right. Just like Colin is deter­mined to fig­ure out how to get water out of the foun­tain, I am deter­mined to fig­ure out this beau­ti­ful thing called life and all the new things God is teach­ing me. What are you deter­mined to do or be? What helps you per­se­vere through dif­fi­cult times? Leave me a com­ment below.

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Is he not the cutest lit­tle guy? I just want to squeeze him!