God Moves In A Mysterious Way...."

Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing. (I Thessalonians 5:11)

"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform...."  William Cowper.

            "Encourage" is one of those marvelous words that just begs to be taken apart. The first two letters mean "in" of course, so to encourage means to put courage in. Ah, but the "courage" part has a secret, too. The "cour" part comes from a Latin term meaning "heart." The heart only recently became associated with sentiment. For most of recorded history, it was the home of the will. The word comfort is like it, meaning "with strength" rather than "there, there. it'll be OK."

            For some, encouragement is cheerleading, "YOU (pompom rustle) CAN (pompom rustle), DO (pompom rustle) IT! (Jump, twirl, pompom shakes with lots more jumping thrown in.) There is a time and place for that. We could all use cheerleaders in our lives, though they might not use the pompoms or jump around.

            There are other ways to encourage. Yesterday, I went to see an educational display of birds of prey. The senior exhibit personnel gave me permission to take pictures of the birds - but not the people. One person on the team even said that he should be "photoshopped" out. I took 60 pictures, which is probably far too few, and I was frustrated by the fact that my camera seems to blur out images whenever  I try to get it to zoom in too close.

           As I got back in my car, something someone had suggested before came to mind.: I should check my settings. When it was suggested, I thought, "That's too complicated." It's not, really. By doing so, I found out what I was doing wrong and a couple options that might be better.

           After downloading my shots to my computer, it came to mind that I could try using Photoshop. In the past, it has seemed far to difficult for me, but there were too many human body parts and too much background in my pictures. I wanted pictures of birds, not people and buildings. I began cropping. The results are lots better than the originals. I turned to some older pictures, and happened on one that was tilted. I was able to rotate the trees to vertical and crop it. It's still not a good picture, but it's better.

             None of this should impress you with my skills as a photographer or photo editor. The point is that "YOU CAN DO IT" was not the encouragement that got me there. What got me there was a repeated request (birds, not people) and the word, "try"  said not as a command, but as a gentle challenge

            Yoda, and other motivational speakers, said, "Do. Or do not. There is no try." Perhaps for Luke, that was encouragement. Perhaps there wasn't time for  repeated trying. But as an aphorism, Yoda's encouragement was wrong. God allows and even encourages us to "try" and to have the freedom to fail and try again.             

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In the Sky:
Strawberry Moon
Summer Solstice