My Corner Online

 

Defying Time

 

6/21/2007

As I begin to scrap more and more older photos, especially those of my boys where I was present at the time the snapshot was made, I am experiencing how photographs (and digital scrapbooking) defies time. Anyone who has scrapped old photos, or even sat and looked through old photos, will understand what I am trying to express.

It is a hard concept to put into words, but I want to try because I know my readers will identify. As I look at photos of my boys, it is as if time is disregarded, as if I am transported in time back to the moment the photo is taken.

Is this the way God sees time? ("But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." 2 Peter 3:8)

To God, a minute in our time can seem the same as years for us. The clock on the wall no longer matters. Through photographs, I am actually living in the past as if I were there again. I am in the past, but yet still in the present, and glimpsing into the future.

Digital scrapbooking provides a means to look through a window of life. Our layouts are tools which allow us to experience the present through the past. We are unconscious of time as if we are on the other side of a pane of glass, the past on one side and the present on the other, our layout on one side and us on the other, in the same moment, but yet not. Suddenly, our mind looks forward to the future, reflecting on what time has already changed.

Photographs capture a moment and time is standing still, always there for us to peek at time and time again. As I look at photos taken before my time, photos of my parents or grandparents before I was born, I am carried even to that instant when the shutter flashed. That split second in time, although I never experienced it personally, is now a part of my memory. This feeling of being in a moment of time before my time draws me into genealogy. If you have ever been drawn into genealogy, you will appreciate this concept. It pulls you in and you want to know more about those moments, to learn more about yourself.

A difficult situation can seem to be a very long time to us and yet life itself seems so short. I am sure you have experienced this defile of time in your own life. Time is not always regulated by the second on a clock, but rather time can be limitless. We live every moment in time with no limits as we journal on our pages. Have you ever sat in front of your computer scrapping and been totally oblivious to that which is around you? It feels as if you are in the moment in the past which you are scrapping, not in the present.

[a challenge for you] What strings of words in this writing can you pull out as stand alone words for a scrapbooking title? Read this writing again and try it. Take an old photo and scrap it using this title and then drop back by and share it with me.

Here is a layout I did (everything made by myself). As I look at photos of my boys when they are little, I just want to reach back in time and kiss them, only that pane in the window of time is between me and that photo and the inability to kiss them transports me back to the present.