Last Wednesday, I drove to the pier in the rain, an hour before high tide. There was no beach.
The water had come all the way up over the brick and was swirling around the legs of the bench, the trash can was standing in the middle of a river, and waves were breaking against the boardwalk where I have watched several hundred sunrises come up over calm water. In all my years of mornings at Yorktown, I have never seen the York River behave like that. The place I set my striped beach chair every day was gone.
I photographed it in the dark and the rain and posted the set before school.
That post made waves. Four hundred and sixty-eight reactions. Eighty-four shares. My page nearly doubled its following in a matter of days, and I have spent the week since then trying to make sense of the fact that the morning the water swallowed my sanctuary is when the world finally stopped to notice me. My page is called Chasing the Sun. There was no sun.
The next morning, an Associated Press photographer found me out there with my camera. He said there wasn’t much to report. The water was in the sand, the sand was on the street, and detached boards from our pier were lapping in the waves. He filmed me talking with William, a homeschooled high school photographer who comes out for the birds, and then he asked me about the beach, and I told him the truth. This entire beach has changed. Where I usually set my striped beach chair, there is no beach. Just swallowed. It aired on CBS later that morning. William’s mother sent me the clip.
There was no sunrise that day or the day after that or for a solid week. Cloud and rain and wind, morning after morning, and the sun never showed its face over the York.
The sunsets were a different story entirely. The stark contrast from dawn to dusk shocked and amazed.
Four nights in a row, the forecast promised nothing. There were clouds all day, no break anywhere in the models, and ultimately no earthly reason to drive thirty minutes to stand on a shoreline and look at a gray wall. I went anyway. Four nights in a row, God performed a miracle over the James River if you were there to witness it.
Friday at Huntington Beach, the clouds fought the sun all afternoon; about twenty minutes before it was due to set, the sky broke open bright and gold and tipped the cloud deck pink and purple over the water. I had the nerve to ask for a heron. One flew in almost immediately, which I have stopped being surprised by and have not stopped being grateful for. People found me there.
Saturday, I went to Riverview Farm Park under a sky that had gone dark and foreboding over the neighborhoods behind me. It started to sprinkle, and the overlook was empty. That overlook is never empty. Everybody had looked at the forecast or the clouds overhead and written the evening off. Then, the James caught fire. Gold, then red, then purple running along the tops of the clouds, and I stood there by myself watching the most glorious sky of the week happen in front of an audience of one.
Sunday, I went to the lions and never saw the sun at all. Not once, in two hours. The cloud deck held all the way down and the sun stayed behind it from start to finish, and the sky over the James still put on a show that went on and on, red and deepening, with the stone lion keeping watch and a heron standing in the glow and a mother down the shore quietly watching her son on his very first date. I wrote that night that God roars mighty as a lion at sunset even when you never see the sun itself. We do not need to see God for the evidence of Him to announce itself.
Last night, I spent ninety minutes alone on a stranger’s private shoreline where no one could find me.
I had posted in a Virginia group earlier this summer asking where else in Hampton Roads a person might go to chase a sunset. Catherine, who had never met me, offered me her backyard. I went once in summer and was waiting for fall for another visit.
I had captured the miracle at Huntington Beach and Riverview Farm Park and Lion’s Bridge; I was running out of public water to hit in hopes that God would deliver another surprise sunset. Catherine’s backyard is on the James in Merry Point Estates. I sent her a text last night. “Park in my driveway,” she shot back.
It was cloudy for most of it, but there was a gap where the deck that consumed the sky floated above the river. I knew it would happen before it did. The sun dropped beneath the clouds for about three minutes and threw a starburst that poured a river of gold across the water. The James River Bridge lit up in the distance, a sea of half-drowned pilings caught the last of it, and a red bar sat on the horizon long after the sun was gone and refused to fade. When it was too dark to shoot anything but that red glow, I simply sat down and stayed.
I was completely alone on a shoreline I had no right to. And I was completely at peace. The river lapped, cicadas buzzed, and I was still. There were no people. Just me and God on a private beach in the red glow. It was precious.
When I started this hobby of chasing the light, I was always alone. These days, though, it’s rare someone doesn’t recognize me. When I was on my date with the sunset at Huntington on Friday, a woman walked up to me and asked if I was Laura Joy.
When I said yes, she lit up and gushed like I was a celebrity, so excited to be meeting me in person. Her name is Dev. She follows Chasing the Sun, and she was out watching the sunset with her son visiting from Texas. She asked to have her picture taken with me. We stood on the boat dock, both of us in pink while the sky burned orange behind us and the water mirrored it back up at us, and I have my camera hanging around my neck, held in both hands, and pointed at nothing… an unusual shot.
I would rather be behind the camera. Anybody who knows me knows that. But she made me feel like someone special, so I let her capture me with her in front of the sky I was trying to share.
After the sun went down another woman came over and said, “I know you. You’re the woman who chases the light.” Her name is Carol. She is a photographer, too.
Two strangers in one evening who knew my face. A third who gave me her shoreline. An Associated Press photographer who came looking for a nor’easter and put me on national television. Thirty-seven new followers in a single day and dozens more since.
I start most evenings by myself. I’ve written more than once about being the woman at the edge of the frame, alone on purpose, before anyone else arrives. This was the week the solitude kept getting interrupted, and every interruption was a gift that made the stillness of that silent shoreline last night even more precious to me, something I wouldn’t have noticed a few months ago.
Sunday morning at church, we sang a song by Elevation Worship called “Worthy”. I’ve sung it before many times and loved it for the beautiful harmonies. This was different.
Be exalted now in the heavens as your glory fills this place. You alone deserve our praise.
I could not get through it. I had spent two nights watching Him exalted in the heavens over the James and two more were coming. There would be four skies that arrived when nothing had been promised, each one different from the last. I’d watched His glory fill a river. I’d seen His might commanding the wind and the waves that swallowed the beach.
And I was standing in a church singing You alone deserve our praise in the same week that more people looked at my page for the photos and the story than have ever looked before.
You alone.
It is easy to start believing the attention belongs to you, to mistake a good week for a good woman.
The light, put simply, does not need me.
Saturday night at Riverview, the sun poured itself out over an empty overlook with no one else watching. It would have done the same thing if I’d stayed home. My contribution is simply that I show up and point the camera for the express purpose of showing you, “Look what God did tonight!”
Pastor Hunter preached out of John 14 on the promise of the Holy Spirit, and he gave us three things we are promised. Presence, so that we are never alone. Peace, which he described as a settled confidence. And illumination, the Spirit taking the character of Christ and producing it in us.
I have had the presence all summer. I know what it is to stand at a water’s edge before dawn and not be by myself.
The peace is newer, and I can tell you exactly where I felt it. It wasn’t in the numbers or in the interview, but rather on a stranger’s shore in the dark after the sun was already gone with nobody there and nothing left to photograph.
The illumination is a work in progress. Whatever Dev saw when she walked up to me on that dock, whatever Carol recognized, and whatever made Catherine hand her backyard to a woman she had never met, it did not originate with me. I have been out there capturing something, receiving something, and pouring out from that cup in between. If it looks like light, that’s because it is.
The sunrise and the beach came back yesterday morning, but it was even sweeter today. I got to the pier and found the same strip of fire the James had given me last night, a thin seam underneath a heavy deck, and the entire sky lit from below in pink and purple. The sun came up blazing under the pier and then rose back into the cloud and disappeared.
The James at dusk and the York at dawn, both on fire, less than twelve hours apart.
The people on the riverwalk stopped jogging. The fishermen set down their rods. Everyone stared at the sky, which is the correct response and is also, more or less, what I’ve been trying to get anyone to do through my pictures.
The light does not require an audience. It is not ruled by a forecast. It certainly does not need me. The heavens declare the glory of God. They’ve done it every day of my life, but I only started paying attention two years ago.
I am not the story, and neither is the camera. I’m a witness. I’m one person standing on a beach with her mouth open in awe, and when somebody recognizes me now, I understand what it actually means. The glory, the majesty, the wonder of God captured in photos? It means they saw it, too.
Be exalted now in the heavens. You alone.
