Capturing the moment v/s living the moment

A good friend of mine loves to take photos. From time to time she will even bring her camera to work and snap shots of us (whether we are in the mood for it or not) :-) One of the things about her pictures that I always think is so cute is the sheer number of them that she takes! If she printed them out you could use her pictures as a flip book and view animation for goodness sakes. No, I'm not exaggerating.



She and I were talking recently about fun trips we've taken over the past couple of years. She said something that got me thinking. She mentioned that when she's on a trip, she's never really having as much fun as she does looking back on the trip. I found this surprising considering how happy she always looks in the pics. Then I reminded myself of the fact that, again, she always has TONS of pictures to share. I began wondering if this is related. I started thinking about all of my friends who vacation a lot, and it occurred to me that most of them are actually this way. They have several gigabytes of photos accumulated from a trip that only lasted 3 or 4 days. I started wondering whether or not these people are spending a great deal of their trip trying to get the perfect photo to show to others when they get back home. In the age of social networking, are we more concerned with what our Flickr or Facebook friends will think of our photos than we are about having a great time with our friends and loved ones? Interesting times we are living in...they kind of sneaked up on me to be completely honest.

In fact, I even caught myself scrolling through my memory card photos during the drive home, wondering which ones I could share, and what people would think when they saw them. Then I said to myself "Who cares what OTHERS think of MY family photos?" I like the pictures and that's what matters. This attitude should probably be used more often in my life. I'm 33 years old and so far, reacting to the opinions of others has gotten me NOTHING positive in this life. :-)

Miraculous Recovery!

You may recall my dismay with the loss of valuable photos from my son's 1st two years.

I had all of the photos saved on the laptop I was issued at my previous company. When I left the company and turned in my laptop in 2005, my son was already a year and a half old, and all of the pictures of him from birth to that current time were stored on the laptop. I had the network engineer download the pictures to CDs for me. Read the rest here.

I had given up on ever finding those pictures again. A very heartbroken feeling loomed over me and increased with every passing day as the realization that I would never see those pictures again set in. So check this out:

I bought a few items on eBay over the past week. My eBay account is still attached to my old Yahoo account that I don't check anymore. Over the past few days, I have been checking the Yahoo account to get the tracking numbers from the eBay sellers so that I can find out when my packages would be delivered. Most of my packages have already arrived, so this evening I went back through my Yahoo mail account one more time just to see what was still in there. I found some very old emails from November 2004 (right after one of my best friends passed away). I found a few emails from my aunt who has Lou Gehrig's disease now, and has lost the ability to communicate with us. I found emails from my friend Allison from before her husband was in a near-death motorcycle accident years ago. Lots of old memories.

Then the thought hit me...maybe over time, I sent lots of pictures of my son out to family and/or friends from that Yahoo account. I did a search for my son's name, but nothing was coming up that was helpful. My hope began fading into sadness again. Just as I was about to shut down the account, a particular email stuck out to me. The subject had my son's name and said "3 months old". My heart skipped a beat. It even had an attachment. I opened the email, and it was an email from a couple that we are good friends with at our church. They were inviting us to a C-Group meeting. Bummer. I was about to close down the browser all together and just spend the rest of the evening reading a good book. Something made me scroll down to the bottom of that email.

Once I got to the bottom I noticed that I had actually sent this couple an email that contained a link of some sort. I clicked on the link and it sent me to...wait for it...Yahoo Photos where there a BUNCH of photos from Olan's birth through 6 months of age!! The exact pics that I thought were lost!! Praise God!! I am so thankful, and I know that this was only made possible by the Grace of God. I had almost started to believe that I'd ever see these pictures again! NEVER say NEVER! Amen!