Perfect pictures require keeping a camera handy

Whenever you see that perfect picture is when you don't have a camera handy. It happened to my wife and me twice in the last couple of days. The first time we were on the road, somewhere in Cumberland or Robeson County, I think, on a rural, two-lane road, late Friday afternoon. The sun was setting, and I was shifting my head to dodge the glare of sunlight that my dark glasses couldn't shade. Then the sun dipped below the tree line on the horizon, and the scattering of high clouds turned pink and red in a glorious display of natural painting. For 20 minutes and about as many miles, the colors in the sky shifted, brightened and dimmed as we watched in awe.

"If we only had a camera," my wife said.

"There's one in the trunk," I replied. "Do you want to stop?" But we were in a hurry to get where we were going (aren't we always?), so we didn't think it worth the trouble and the delay to stop.

Later that cold night, when the temperature would drop to around 10 degrees, I stepped outside and looked up at the dark sky, which was illuminated more brightly than I had seen it in years by the southern constellations. Orion's belt was brightly jeweled, each star distinct and clear against the darkest black background. Sirius in Canis Major trailed behind the hunter, and Taurus the bull menaced him to the right, bright stars marking the tips of his horns and the Pleiades forming a cloud above him. The clear sky and chilling temperatures had combined for the perfect star-viewing conditions, turning the dark dome of the sky into its more perfect imitator, a planetarium's ceiling, where each star is perfectly visible and their numbers are uncountable.

Modern men have little appreciation of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis to make his offspring as numerous and uncountable as the stars in the heavens or the sands on the shore. Urban skies, with their competing light and air pollution have dimmed out all but the brightest stars. We lose the overwhelming magnitude of that divine promise.

On Friday night, with the right equipment, a fast camera and a tripod, I might have captured a view of the sky as it was 5,000 years ago, before electric lighting, overpopulation and air pollution dimmed everything. But I was not equipped for such a task, so I hold it only in memory and inadequate words.

For readers who appreciate the visual, I offer this link to a blog offered by someone who keeps her camera handy and uses it well.