I superglued my heel shut last week. I didn’t plan to write that first sentence, but it’s where everything else starts, so I’ll begin there. Six days ago, I was standing out on the shoals before dawn, ankle-deep in water I know well, framing a sailboat moored past the shallows with her mast running straight up through the place the sun was about to break. I felt the skin rip open as I caught a rock. Sharp and immediate until the cold water took the edge off. Of course, I stayed exactly where I was because the light was coming and I was not going to miss it.

I got the frame. Next stop was the courthouse.

That morning was supposed to be the most defining day of a tragically heavy year, only it did not go the way any of us thought it would go. When I came out of that room, part of me wanted to scream, part of me wanted to cry, and all of me had to drive home, wash my face, put on fresh makeup, and stand in my classroom for Back to School Night greeting seventy new sixth graders who will never know what my morning held or why my foot started bleeding again on our building tour.

My principal let me go home early. I bandaged my foot to keep the sand out at sunset while I watched the news and saw another photograph I’d been injured to snap pop up on the screen.  Last Monday, I’d climbed the railing down to the rocks at Riverview Farm Park to get an unobstructed frame, and the weight of the tripod on my shoulder pulled me over backward. Scraped leg. A bruise on my backside I could feel every time I sat down for a week. That photograph was airing on the evening news while I was doctoring my heel.

The next day, I could barely get around. I probably needed stitches. I hobbled through work meetings, then I glued it shut myself as soon as I got home from school. It still hurts.

On Friday, every forecast in Hampton Roads promised no sunset anywhere. Total cloud deck. A friend told me not to bother. I drove to Yorktown anyway all the way from Fort Monroe, and saw the sun heading for one thin seam in all that gray. I made a U-turn I probably shouldn’t have made, nearly took out a curb, and ran for the beach on that heel. Running on the balls of my feet hurt it less than walking. I discovered that out mid-sprint.

I would do it again. I think some of you read this blog and imagine I am out there being gentle with myself. I am not. If you hear one day that I got struck by lightning at the water’s edge, don’t be surprised and don’t pity me. I have never in my life felt more alive than the night I stood between two clusters of lightning with strikes coming down all around me, dry under my own small patch of sky. That would have been worth it. Getting the shot is worth scrapes and bruises.

Every single time.

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My small group closed out the summer in the book of James. “Count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds because the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.” I have known that verse since I was a girl. What I had glossed over is that James doesn’t stop at endurance. “Let steadfastness have its full effect, he says, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

Lacking in nothing.

I spent my thirties keeping a ledger of what I lacked. A husband. Children. The porch swing and the dark-haired babies with olive skin I named in Mrs. Feldman’s class. I read that verse now as a woman losing a marriage and already missing a stepdaughter she doesn’t get to keep. This week, Calista started a school year without me in it, and I caught myself doing the ordinary maternal arithmetic I no longer have any right to. Are her teachers a good fit. Does she have friends in her classes. I grieved her fresh.

James isn’t telling me the ledger balances. He’s telling me the completing happens through the thing I would have paid anything to avoid.

I keep being put in positions where I have to do something I did not believe I was capable of doing. Testify. Teach on empty. Stand up in a bookstore and sign my name. Walk out of a courtroom and into a classroom in the same afternoon. Every time, I do it, and every time I know perfectly well it wasn’t me. “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” That’s not a consolation prize; it’s a mechanism for His glory and my good.

Pain grows us. Wounds, for me, are a most unwelcome catalyst toward completion.

I had two book signings last week, and a court date sat between them. I would never have scheduled it that way if I’d known. What should have been the purest joy of this year, a table stacked with books that have my name on them, arrived shadowed. The joy was real and something heavier was standing directly behind it the entire time.

Finally, I got some news that overshadowed all of this: a friend lost his eldest daughter last week, and somehow everything weighing on me quieted.

I did not have words for him. I still don’t. All that potential snuffed out, a future suddenly incomplete, and I thought about Mama Marci, who drives out to the farm where Joshua’s ashes went into the ground on his birthday and on the anniversary and on any day she needs to be near her son. No parent should have to bury a child. I have no theology to comfort a man standing in that; I couldn’t insult him by reaching for one.

What I had on Sunday was a song. May His favor be upon you, and a thousand generations, and your family, and your children, and their children.

I have sung that line before and felt it land like a wound because there is no thousand generations coming out of me. This time, I sang it over the women in my small group. Over their children. Over my friend and what’s left of his family. It will always hurt that I did not get to be a mother. The love didn’t evaporate when it had no one to serve. It went sideways instead of down, and I am still learning to let it go where it goes.

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Wounds made me a photographer. I have shot, edited, and posted more than a hundred and fifty sunrise and sunset sets since June. Those photographs exist because of what happened in February.

Not the sunrises themselves. Those were already mine. I’ve been driving to the York River before dawn since November of 2024, back when it was a trick to steady a body that doesn’t keep good time on its own. The sunsets are the new thing, and I know what made room for them. A year ago, at six in the evening I was standing at a counter browning meat, packing a lunch, running a household, and outside that window the sky was doing something extraordinary every single night. I almost never saw it. That life ended. It did not end by my choosing. It did not end by my hand. In the hole it left, I went looking for the light. I found it twice a day. I have been staying inside it as much as a working woman can.

Much of that archive is made of damage.

Nevertheless, the wound made the hole. It did not make the work. Each of those frames required a woman to get up in the dark, drive to the water, stand in it, and stay. On mornings she could not feel God anywhere. On evenings the forecast promised nothing and delivered less. On a cut heel. On the morning of a hearing. Somebody else ended a life I was living. He does not get the credit for the one I built at the water’s edge afterward.

And I do need the evidence because some days the practice still feels like a cheap and meaningless substitute for a family to do life with. I’m still praying for the day it won’t, though I’d love to tell you a more encouraging version of that truth. Ultimately, the morning comes and I go anyway, and by the time the light is up, I am not thinking about what it’s substituting for.

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And just like the bruised Riverview Farm Park image, at twenty-six minutes past six in the evening, News 3 aired that sailboat shot.

Somebody in Hampton Roads had the television on while they made dinner, and the whole screen went red. The haze had bent the light into something deep and molten, and the sun sat low and round down inside the boat’s rigging like a thing being carried. The mast shot up through that color. My name sat atop it in small letters.

That somebody watching didn’t know I was standing on the shoals. They didn’t know I was bleeding into the river while I waited for it. They didn’t know what that morning was about to ask of me.

That’s what a photograph does. It keeps the light and it loses the cost.

I think God is making a beautiful capture out of me the same way in every scrape, every bruise, every mile driven in the dark toward a sky that might not show up. He is holding the shutter open on a woman who does not yet know what she’s being exposed for. He is not in a rush. He does not miss.

The picture doesn’t carry the wound.

The photographer does.

This photographer has an Author. He wrote the sunrise before He wrote me into it, and He knows what every scrape cost. That’s why I keep going back. The wounds don’t close at the water’s edge, but they quiet there, under a favor I did not earn, in a light I did not make, before the One who kept His scars to redeem even me.