The Blessing of Seeing What Is Right in Front of You (Matt. 5)

As I mentioned in my last blog, I attended a writing conference at The Grand in Point Clear this  week, and we were challenged by one of the presenters, the prolific Alabama poet and author Irene Latham, to choose a very small but important word to notice this year. Then Ms. Latham took us through the process of writing a nonet (a structured nine-line poem) using that word.

It was at this point that my perambulations of the night before at the Fairhope Municipal Pier, where I went for the sole purpose of taking pictures, and my writing endeavors and educational goals collided with God's ever-present and much needed work in me. 

Here is the story:

When I arrived, the time of day (roughly 5:00 p.m.) and the incredible humidity combined with an approaching storm, making for a sparsely populated pier. The sun was much brighter than it needed to be for me to take anything resembling a decent picture, so I determined to sweat it out while I waited to see if the storm would obscure a chance for a sunset picture of the pier a bit later. In the meantime, I walked to the entrance of the pier and thought about what I would practice composition-wise in the meantime. 

I saw lines everywhere, so I raised my camera to my eye and followed the lines of the handrails down the length of the pier to the structures beyond them, first the left, and then a few minutes later, the right. I did not see the few people in the frame because I was so focused on the goal of following the line to the end of the pier and took several shots. I even remember thinking, "There's a woman in the way!" and realizing that I needed to avoid any close-up pictures that would make anyone identifiable. 

Suddenly, the pier became much more active and very crowded with other photographers taking pictures of groups of people and lots of young people roaming about in packs, so I moved away from the structure instead of walking to the end of it as I had originally planned, the thunder beginning to sound and lightning flashing from the east with the now quickly approaching storm. I took a few shots of the storm behind the water fountain and and then several of the approaching storm before getting in my car when the lightning got too close for comfort. While sitting there in my comfortable air-conditioned car, safe from the storm blowing around me and the lightning striking nearby, I looked back at the pictures and noticed her in them.

I do not know her name or her story.

She walked towards me in the first picture I took of the pier as a whole; she stood restlessly on one side in another, her head lowered onto the pier's right rail. She had no shoes on, and looking back, I realized I had seen her (in my peripheral vision) and noticed without noticing that she sat on a bench rocking herself back and forth, but it was her defeated posture in the last picture she appeared in that triggered my own defeat, making me question what I saw:

• Was this woman homeless, and had I failed to notice? (If not, I apologize unknown woman for assuming anything about you.) 
• Did she need to talk to someone, and I was too busy to listen? (If she did, it is my sorrow I didn't slow down enough to see her and speak with her while the opportunity was available.) 
• Could I find her and speak to her of the hope I was always to be ready to share? (No. She disappeared with the storm that drove me to my car.)

The answer to these questions is that I will probably never know who she was, what brought her across my path, why she looked so defeated and tired, or whether she has a safe place to put her head. About that time, before the storm passed over, the police drove up and several other cars that parked between me and the pier, obscuring my vision. When the storm disappeared, she was gone with it. I looked for her and did not find her. Maybe she had just been thinking through some tough things in her life. Maybe she was praying and her stance was simply the desired, broken, contrite one that God values. Maybe she was just another woman on vacation. 

I just do not know. 

But I do know that as I looked back at my pictures, God used her to challenge me to see in the moment instead of only noticing when I look back; because she was present and I was "checked out" in my single-minded focus on the task at hand, I wrote the things that follow in the workshop the next morning, connecting my reading about Jonah and his arrogant pride and cluelessness to its application in my own life. God works in not-so-mysterious ways often, and I have to believe there was no coincidence in this lesson He offered me. 

The word that came to my mind when Ms. Latham began her lesson challenging us to choose a special little word was "see." The process we went through and resulting poems as well as my picture of her (from the more distant vantage I took and then closer at the end) are below if you have a few minutes and want to be challenged to do the same. The process at the workshop--not in a spiritual context at all (being a secular conference full of teachers seeking ways to improve their teaching process and commitment to writing)--became a spiritual process for me, allowing me to focus on what God was doing that day in and around me. He is faithful to work out in me (using whatever process he desires) that which needs working on in my life.

The Nonet Entry

Step one: choose the word that will become your focus as well as the title of your poem. 

    SEE

Step two: define your word and/or list synonyms for it.

    SEE 

look, detect, perceive with eyes, understand, notice, behold, 

visualize, form a mental picture

Step three: using your definition, brainstorm a nonet (working up from 1-syllable first line to nine-syllable last line, 45 syllables total). This is seen below. I was thinking about what I wanted to be able to do when I look, to truly see something or someone with fresh eyes, and this is what I wrote:

                                                      SEE 

Close

your eyes.

Your palate

washed clean, able

to discern. Behold

a world beyond your small

self-contained, preconceived, tired

environment. Detect something.

Understand. Use your eyes. Perceive. See.

Step four: reverse directions, working from nine-syllable line back down to 1-syllable line, make changes, edit, expand ideas. This is seen below along with the more distant picture that I chose to use before cropping:

                                              SEE

Perception impaired, I look through you,

head-down on the rails of your life,

longing for someone to look

at your brokenness, you,

beyond hope in the

storm of your life.

Blind no more,
I now

see.

Step five: write a short anecdote to go along with your poem (imitating her 2020 release with Charles Waters Dictionary for a Better World: Poems, Quotes and Anecdotes from A to Z) .

I stood shooting pictures of the pier I'd wanted to see at sunset, following the leading lines of the handrails that guarded the safety of those walking over the water below. My focus quickly became full of the roiling of the stormy sky to the east, the squawking of the greedy sea gulls around me, the gigantic gray birds perched on pillars alongside the pier, pillars that reminded of former piers blown down by past storms. Distracted by families moving in and out of my viewfinder, joyful laughter melding with the loud cries of sea birds, and the sharp smell of the quickly-approaching storm, I missed her, head down on the rail. Only when I looked later at my pics did I realize she might have been homeless or needing help, and I didn't notice her or come to her aid. I want to be able to see in the moment what I missed that day; I want to see with the eyes of Jesus, loving people the way He does.

Step six: find a quote to accompany your "entry" on your word. Here are two among many verses in the Bible about seeing and one about not seeing from C.S. Lewis:

Matthew 5:8, ESV

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Matthew 5:29, ESV

If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.

“You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. 

The whole point of seeing through something is 

to see something through it. It is good 

that the window should be transparent, 

because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. 

How if you saw through the garden too? 

It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. 

If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. 

But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. 

To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

So. There it is. The importance of truly seeing, looking, perceiving. When I spend time in God's Word, when I communicate with Him, seek Him, delight in Him, He is faithful to show me, to reveal in me what is sinful, what needs "seeing to," what needs attention, correction, and discipline. 

He sees without fail. 

He is always faithful. 

I want to be as well in my time here on this earth, so here is my prayer again today:

Lord, help me see!