It was a cool November morning in 2012. I was standing at the edge of Old Hickory Lake with my camera set up for the sunrise.
The water was perfectly still. The sky was moving from deep purple toward blazing orange, and everything seemed to be coming together for one of those mornings photographers hope for.
I remember looking at the sky and saying quietly, “God, You’re really showing off this morning.”
It was partly a prayer and partly just a spontaneous observation. Look what You’ve done.
And then I experienced something I have never forgotten. Not an audible voice. But as clearly as I knew I was standing beside that lake, I sensed God speaking to my heart:
Child, you are my favorite creation.
I was stunned. Me? More beautiful than that sunrise? For a few moments, the photograph didn’t seem quite as important.
We recognize His handiwork everywhere
I’ve always found it easy to see God in creation. A spectacular sunrise. Mountains. Water. Clouds catching the last light of the day. The complexity of something as small as a flower. Stand beneath a dark sky filled with stars and it’s difficult not to feel small.
Photography probably makes me even more sensitive to those things. A photographer learns to watch light, color, texture, shape, and those brief moments when ordinary things suddenly become extraordinary. We look at something beautiful and think: God made that.
But standing beside Old Hickory Lake that morning, I was confronted with another thought. Why is it so much easier to recognize God’s handiwork in a sunrise than in ourselves?
The part of creation that bears His image
The opening chapter of Genesis describes the creation of light, sky, land, vegetation, the sun and moon, creatures of the sea, birds, and animals. Then something changes. When God creates humanity, Scripture says: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.”
That distinction matters. The sunrise was God’s creation. So was the lake. So were the clouds reflecting all that extraordinary color. But Scripture says something unique about human beings. We bear His image.
That doesn’t mean I walked away from the lake that morning thinking I was more visually impressive than an orange and purple Tennessee sunrise. That wasn’t the point. The point was value. I had been overwhelmed by the beauty of what God had made, while perhaps forgetting that I was standing there as part of His creation too.
And so is every person I meet.
That changes how we look at people
There is a comfortable way to read the idea that we are created in God’s image: we apply it to ourselves. There is a more challenging way: we apply it to everybody else.
The person who irritates us. The employee who is struggling. The stranger whose life we don’t understand. The person who disagrees with us. The person society overlooks. The person who has made a mess of things.
If people bear the image of God, then human dignity isn’t something we earn through accomplishment, status, intelligence, attractiveness, wealth, or good behavior. It is something we begin with. That doesn’t mean every decision is good or every behavior should be excused. It means the person remains valuable even when the behavior needs to change.
I’ve spent much of my life working with people, leading people, photographing people, learning from people, and occasionally being frustrated by people. That morning at the lake gave me another way of thinking about them. And about myself.
Learning to see
Photography teaches us to look carefully. Sometimes the photograph is obvious. Sometimes we have to slow down before we see what’s actually there. Faith can require the same kind of attention.
That November morning I went to Old Hickory Lake looking for a beautiful sunrise. I found one. But the sunrise isn’t what I remember most. I remember standing behind my camera, overwhelmed by what God had painted across the sky, and playfully telling Him He was showing off.
And I remember what came next.
Years later, I still think about that morning. It reminds me that sometimes we spend so much time admiring what God has made that we overlook His image in the person standing right in front of us.
Sometimes that person is a stranger. Sometimes it’s someone difficult to love. And sometimes the person we have the most difficulty seeing that way is the one looking back at us from the mirror.