A Dim View

Photographs perpetuate our most precious memories.

They bring our past to life again, giving wings to our imagination and touching our deepest feelings. Indeed, as Edward Steichen supposedly noted, “a portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.” And “a true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.”1 Today almost everyone is an amateur photographer, sharing pictures through social media. But it has not always been this way. In 1826 or 1827, the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce took the earliest known photograph of a real-world scene. On January 2, 1839, another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, took the first reported picture of the moon. Unfortunately, two months later, a fire destroyed his laboratory, including that picture. Those early pictures were black-and-white, presenting only a dim view of reality. They could not reproduce all the beauty of the people and scenes photographed. From those early days, photography has passed through many stages of development, using metallic plates, glass plates, plastic films, and Polaroid papers, and photographers have used different chemical substances to capture the light’s effects. Even so, your best modern digital photographs cannot portray the full panorama and majesty of your favorite places. Having no feelings in themselves, they are only images evoking memories. A photo of a sunset is the image of the actual sunset and not vice versa, for there is much more in the real sunset than in its picture.

Likewise, the book of Revelation provides only a dim and vague picture of the heavenly realm; its description of heaven is far from representing its full glory and majesty (1 Corinthians 13:12). While we are still in this world, we should keep in mind the insightful words attributed to Ziad K. Abdelnour: “Life is like a camera. Focus on what’s important. Capture the good times. And if things don’t work out, just take another shot.” But when God takes us from this world into heaven, from time into eternity, then all our best pictures of this life will lose their significance. Then we “will see his face,” and He will be our light (Revelation 22:4, 5). In the very presence of God, we will find the fullest expression of our existence!