real

"That was the real you running through the fields of gold wide open,
standing in places no picture contains."

Learning to Love Again
Mat Kearney

How I long to stand in a place no picture contains. To exist momentarily in a place no one has captured and drug back to their world of electrifying pixels. Perhaps no such place exists.

Pixels can be astounding. But they can never encapsulate entirety. Pixels can represent a perspective, a moment, but never the whole. I love photographs. I love capturing a moment of time that will never be seen again elsewhere. But it isn't quite the same.

I see their photographs popping up under the blue bar, thumbs up ready to be selected. I see their faces, people I know. Yet the photos are such a shallow depiction of what I know to be behind their smiling eyes. Their pictures create in me a feeling of distance. I was not there. I do not know what they felt before and after the flash of light and click of shutter. It tells me nothing of their souls. Nothing like the times when they sat before me, hearts bleeding vulnerably in my hands. Tears falling from their eyes and filling my own. Even the moments when their eyes clear and joy tumbles invisibly from their lips are more real to me. Moments when the thoughts or judgments of others alter not their course and they become something rare: themselves.

The song above is one of my new favorites, one that reminds me how blessed I have been to see the real people inside my friends-the deepest darkest and brightest.