The Photographs I Am Not In

He is always the one holding the camera. Every birthday, every baptism, every Christmas since the girls were small, and now the grandchildren, and the arrangement is so old that nobody in the family thinks about it anymore.

Somebody says get in, and he says no, no, go on, and lifts the phone, and the moment passes, and the picture is taken, and he is not in it.

There are four albums in the cupboard under the stairs. His wife made them and she is in all of them, and the girls are in all of them, and his mother, who has been gone eleven years, is in the early ones with a hand on somebody's shoulder.

He is in three photographs across two decades, and in two of those he is out of focus at the edge because somebody grabbed the phone off him.

His granddaughter asked him last month, in the direct way of a nine year old, why he is not in any of the pictures. And he said, cheerfully, because I am the one taking them.

She said, but why are you always the one taking them.

And he did not have an answer for her, and he has not stopped thinking about it since.

If you have your own version of stepping out of the frame, you know exactly what I mean. And it is quite possible nobody has ever told you that stepping out is not humility.

What you were warned against is not what you have been doing

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have waited most of your life for anybody to say it out loud at your own table.

Humility never meant thinking little of yourself. It never did. Whoever handed you that handed it over meaning well, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact, because nothing else will land until it is said. You took an instruction from people you loved, you kept it faithfully at real cost for twenty years, and keeping a badly worded instruction is loyalty aimed at the wrong number. There is nothing in it to be ashamed of.

Now read what John does with the subject, because he is not measured about it and it is worth noticing.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.1 John 3:1

Behold is a strange word to find in a letter. It is a word for pointing at something. John is not explaining a doctrine; he is stopping the reader in the corridor and making them look at a thing.

And what he is pointing at is not our response. It is the manner of the love, and the name that came with it. Called the children of God. Not offered the title on approval. Called it, by the Father, out loud.

You have a name the Father gave you, and it is in every family picture whether or not you are standing in the frame. That is not my warmth toward you. It is written in 1 John 3:1, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

Read on one clause and it gets sharper. The world does not know us, John says, because it did not know Him. Which means the people who cannot see it are not the measure of whether it is true. Neither, and I say this gently, are you.

So twenty years behind the camera has not been humility. You are a child of that house, and being in the picture is what a child of a house does. The word settled that before the first album, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the cupboard under the stairs while you read this.

Absence is not the same as modesty

Here is the thing worth naming, because you have never quite named it to yourself.

There are two reasons a man holds the camera. One is that he loves them and wants the day kept. The other is that being in the frame means being looked at, and being looked at means somebody might make an assessment, and you have been avoiding assessments since you were young.

Only the first of those is a gift. The second is a small daily withdrawal, and after two decades the withdrawal has a shape: four albums, a family, and a man missing from his own life.

And here is the cost that nobody mentions to you. The girls will have those albums after you. Your granddaughter will look for you in them.

You have a place in that house that was given by the Father, and standing in it takes nothing from anybody. 1 John 3 says what manner of love, and names you a child of God; His Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that off the page and puts it in a man's chest under the stairs on an ordinary evening.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the house you are in. If part of the reason you keep out of the frame is that somebody near you makes you pay for being seen, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.