It was just there

A few years ago, an amazing opportunity practically fell into my lap.  The chance to create greeting cards using my photographs and verses from own original words and poetry.  While I had, at first, reservations that I could accomplish this endeavor, I jumped in with both feet.  I picked, culled and labored over which photograph would match the card theme that I was working on.  It soon became apparent that the photographs spoke for themselves.  It became evident early on that one photograph shouted “Thinking of You” while another said “With Deepest Sympathy”.  Soon, I was seeing greeting card images everywhere and shot hundreds and occasionally, thousands, of photographs a week.  After arduous scrutiny to pick the very best of the best, they were uploaded onto the host site to be approved for sale.  While I was optimistic, because I am a perpetual optimist and believer that God does not do random things for no reason, I didn’t expect to become a greeting card entrepreneur overnight.  Guidelines showed that it could take up to one year to sell a single card, so I continued to shoot what I saw and prepared to wait.  Three weeks later, the first “You’ve made a sale” notification came in my email.  Excited cannot even begin to describe the range of emotions I felt.  My (late) husband, Jim, became as excited as I and continued to encourage me to explore my photographic abilities further.  I prayed about it and gave thanks to God that He had given me the gift of “an eye” for seeing His beauty the way He wanted me to see it.  Thus, Through the Eyes of the Spirit greeting cards was born.  That was three years ago and since then, the cards have continued to sell.  I have very few of my own photographs hanging in my house, not because I don’t love them, but because I see them in my mind and feel them in my heart.  My mother, on the other hand, has numerous ones on her walls, which is so humbling to me.  I have never, and don’t intend to ever, arrange a landscape shoot.  The beauty of God’s creation is just there, for everyone to see and feel, to immerse themselves into and become a part of something wonderful.  What I see through the lens of my camera is what my eyes are drawn to and I don’t want that to change.  When I begin to feel that creation isn’t enough as it is without my added embellishments, then I will know that I am no longer using this gift for the right reason.  The photographs are a blessing to me, uplifting when I am blue and joyous when I am rejoicing.  It is a great honor and an humbling wonder that I am able to use them as part of the ministry I have been given to share, for irregardless of what I think I know or believe myself to be, it is for His glory that I continue on this remarkable journey that I travel… after all, I am just the clay.