There’s a tree near the picnic tables at Yorktown Beach I never noticed until about a week ago.
It has been standing there the whole time. For two years, I have come to this shore before dawn, set my beach chair on one side of the pier or the other, and stayed there. That was the practice. The pier was the picture. I did not wander.
The sun has been rising behind that tree every October since I started. It was doing it in 2024 when I came just on weekends. It was doing it last year when I could not miss a day. I was two hundred yards away with a camera in my hands and I never saw it because I was not looking for anything beyond that which I’d already discovered and deemed beautiful.
What changed this summer is that I started shooting and posting a full set every single day. That cured me of standing in place. You run out of frames fast when the foreground stays the same, so you start walking down by the picnic tables, over to the shoals, out to the far side of the pier, hunting for something to put in front of the light that will showcase it properly.
Last week, the sun cleared a cloud deck exactly behind that tree and set it on fire. It got my attention. The tree did not change. The light was not new, either. I was. That tree calls to me now like the statues at Lions Bridge.
When you shoot the same shoreline every morning for two years, eventually the challenge stops being the sky and becomes you. How many angles are there from which to photograph one fishing pier? I could set up in the same place and take the same frame of the sun coming up over it every single day, and it would be beautiful every single day because God made that sky beautiful.
However, I would simply be taking a picture of my own habit.
The real work is asking God to show me something I have not seen yet even on a shore I think I’ve memorized. The strange mercy is I needn’t manufacture the newness. The sun does it. It does not let me stand in one place. It keeps sliding down the horizon, month after month, lighting things from angles that did not exist in July; every time it moves, it casts its light on something I’d overlooked or walked right past. Like last week at Lions Bridge when I noticed a statue of a woman sitting in the lake simply because she is framed by the autumn leaves right now.
I went back to the lions on Thursday because it was cloudy and I wanted a challenge.
No fire sky was coming, no showstopper, and I knew it before I got in the car. My last set from that location was still climbing past twelve hundred likes, and I shook that off like an invisible pressure as I parked. I did not go to beat it. I went to re-center. To practice and apply what I have been taught by people who have chosen to invest in me.
I made myself work. My story was the one of fall color instead of fire. Two herons flew over my head into the lake, and I did not chase them. I asked for one at the water’s edge and three showed up, spread out along the shoreline. I tried to shoot the James River Bridge through a lion’s legs.
And then, because nobody else was out there photographing them, I climbed up on one.
I have written about these lions. I wrote last week that the stone never changes and the sky behind it does, that the same lion reads as roaring on one night and at rest on another and that the only difference is what is behind him. I believed that. I still do.
What I did not know until Thursday, up close, is that they are cracked. There are seams where the tails have been glued back together. And on my favorite lion, the one I have been photographing since the very beginning, a whole chunk of his tail is
missing.
Perspective changes things. As stoic and scriptural as these creatures are to me, they are scarred too.
Pastor Colin is helping at another campus for a few weeks, so Hunter preached on Sunday out of John 16, on the work of the Holy Spirit. His last point is the one that got in.
The Holy Spirit glorifies Christ. He declares Christ to us.
He does not bring new material. He takes one subject and keeps turning us back toward Him, and keeps revealing what we have not managed to see yet.
I sat there thinking: that is exactly what has been happening to me at the water.
We sang about the morning that sealed the promise, the buried body that began to breathe, the Roaring Lion coming out of the silence to declare that the grave has no claim. I thought of four stone lions in Newport News and the cracks in their tails. Then we sang way maker, promise keeper, light in the darkness, and I watched every sunrise and sunset of this testing year flash behind my eyes, and I knew it was true because I have the evidence on a hard drive.
Here is the evidence.
A half-dead cypress at Jamestown Beach that called me back all summer. The line of pines at Amory’s Wharf. The old crab house at Watkins Dock. The boughs over the fishing pier at Denbigh. The boathouse across the water at Riverview Farm Park. The pilings at the boat ramp at Gloucester Point. The James River Bridge stretching out into the twilight at Huntington. The slips of the marina at Fort Monroe. The Coleman Bridge, strung with lights, every single morning of my life.
None of those things move. Not one of them has changed in the two years I have been photographing them.
Still, every one of them has declared Christ to me.
Over five consecutive light changes this past week, I watched Him do five entirely different things with the same world. A gap of light over the James at Hilton on Saturday evening, which I had prayed for all day and which lasted twenty minutes and which I thanked Him for out loud. Rain so heavy that same morning that I could not keep my lens clear for an eight-second exposure, standing there wiping glass with numb fingers. Clear skies in Poquoson the night before. Fog the morning before that, so thick the bridge lights glowed. Layered blue and white cloud at Lions Bridge before that.
Five moods of the same Painter. I am learning to love all of them, which I could not have written in June.
Of course, we love what is familiar. I do. The sun has already moved too far south to set behind my cypress at Jamestown, and I am going out there this week not knowing what I will find, and I am a little afraid of it. That tree is my summer sunset crush. I planned entire evenings around it. I will be waiting for June the way you wait for somebody to come home. Maybe that’s the point.
In the meantime, I need to learn that shoreline again from a different angle, which is the only way I’ve ever really grown at anything of import.
I think He will show me something there. He has not missed yet.
Saturday morning, I stood at the pier in driving rain, trying to hold a ten-second exposure with water running down my lens. I could not do it. I wiped the glass and tried again and wiped it and tried again until my hands stopped working.
So, I asked for a heron, the way I do.
One came. He flew directly over my head and out over the Coleman Bridge; there was no earthly way to photograph him in that weather, so I stood on the beach soaked through and watched him go.
I could not shoot him. But the answer was there.
I pray for a heron at the beginning and the end of every day.
It is because he is so much like me. He comes back to the same water twice a day to be fed. He is solitary. He is territorial about his piece of shoreline. He waits in one place far longer than looks reasonable. And when he finally catches something, it is not over, because getting a fish down is a whole second process; I have waited with him, and he has taught me more about patience than any person has before.
Some mornings, he stands by my chair and will not be photographed. Some mornings, I think he is crying out for my attention, and he climbs up on the rocks and poses while I am packing to leave for school. Last night at Huntington, when I was starting to think I had picked the wrong spot entirely, I spotted a pelican on a piling just as a heron flew in to land on the post beside him. I framed the sun setting between them.
The heron is the creature that most declares Christ to me. He reminds me I am chosen and kept, and a solitary life is not a purposeless one.
I’m not just out here hunting pretty light though it may look that way. Standing on a shore I know by heart, asking to be shown something I have not seen, and getting it, over and over, from a world that never changes and a God who will not stop revealing Himself in it.
I have lost the cypress at Jamestown and will find something new to fill the frame there at sunset. At sunrise, I gained a tree by the picnic tables I overlooked for years.
I do not arrange the details of the dawn. He moved the light, and then He spent a summer teaching me to go looking, and the two arrived at the same shore in the same week.
Now, I am wondering what November holds. The sun will keep sliding south until the solstice, and something out there is going to be lit that has never been lit for me before, standing exactly where it has always stood.
I intend to be out walking when it happens with my camera in hand so you can see what God changed with a little light, too.
