I Flinch At Photographs Of Myself Now

Somebody sends the pictures from the weekend.

You scroll. There are twenty of them and they are lovely, and other people's children are in them, and there is one of your husband laughing that you will keep.

And then there is one of you, and your thumb moves before you have thought anything at all.

That is the moment. Not the photograph. The thumb.

Because the thumb is faster than you are, and it has been for about two years now, and it means you have not actually seen a picture of yourself since some point you could not name if somebody asked you.

I want to sit here for a while, because there is a version of this conversation that goes straight to the picture and I think that version is useless.

People will tell you the picture is fine. They will say it is a bad angle, that the light was wrong, that nobody looks good in a group shot. Some of that is even true.

But none of it touches the flinch, and the flinch is the thing that is actually happening in your life. Twenty pictures, one flinch, and it takes about a quarter of a second, and it happens every single time.

What a flinch actually is

A flinch is not a judgment. It is worth being precise about that, because it changes what we are working with.

A judgment is slow. It involves looking at something, weighing it, and coming to a view. A flinch happens before any of that, and it is not available for discussion, and arguing with it is like arguing with a knee.

Which means the usual approach is wrong from the start. Being told the picture is fine is an argument aimed at a judgment, and there is no judgment there to aim at. There is a reflex.

You are dealing with a reflex rather than a verdict, and no argument about a photograph has ever once been able to reach it. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what she is actually up against, and Isaiah 46 puts a carrying promise underneath the exact years the flinch is about.

Now the second thing, which is what the flinch is quietly costing.

There is nobody in your own family album any more where you should be.

Not because nobody photographs you. Because you never look, and increasingly you avoid being in them, and there is now a stretch of years where a person going back through those pictures in twenty years will find your husband and your children and your friends, and almost nothing of the woman whose care held the whole thing together.

That is not a small loss and it is not about vanity in any direction. Your children will want those. And the reason they will not have many is a quarter of a second that has been happening on a sofa.

You are being edited out of a record by something that lasts a quarter of a second, and that flinch has never once been asked whether it had the authority. Scripture in Isaiah 46 has God saying what He does with a person all the way to old age, and the Spirit of God is the one who slows a hand down enough for something else to happen.

Even to hoar hairs will I carry you

There is a sentence in Isaiah that I would put in front of anybody at fifty.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. (Isaiah 46:4, King James Version)

Count the verbs, because they are stacked up on purpose.

Carry. Made. Bear. Carry again. Deliver. Five of them in one verse, and every single one is something He does and you receive.

There is no instruction anywhere in it. Nothing is asked of the person being addressed. This is not a verse about how to age well. It is a verse about who is doing the carrying while it happens, and the answer is not you.

You are carried through exactly the years the flinch is about, and there has never once been a stretch of them where you were doing the carrying yourself. It is written in Isaiah 46 that even to hoar hairs will I carry you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a promise underneath a woman on a sofa with a phone in her hand.

And look at the pairing in the middle. I have made, and I will bear.

He puts the making and the carrying in the same breath, as though they were one continuous act. The one who made this face is the one carrying it, and He has not handed the second job to anybody else and has never once treated it as finished.

Which means the face in that photograph is not a thing you have to defend or account for. It is a thing being carried, by the one who made it, right now, on that sofa, while your thumb moves.

You are looking at something God is currently carrying, and it has never once been a thing left with you to manage alone. The Spirit of God is what puts the making and the carrying together in a woman's own hearing, and the written word says I have made, and I will bear.

Looking at one, all the way

So here is the assignment, and it is exactly one photograph.

Look at one picture of yourself all the way to the end, without scrolling past it.

That is the whole thing. Not the whole album. Not every picture from the weekend. One, chosen at random, looked at until the looking is finished rather than until the flinch has finished moving a thumb.

You are able to stay with one picture until the looking finishes, and a thumb moving in half a second has never once been a decision anybody made. Isaiah 46 says even to hoar hairs will I carry you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is there for the whole of a long look.

There are two rules.

Do not study it. Studying is the list with better resolution and it is not what we are after. Just look at it the way you would look at a photograph of anybody else you know.

And do not decide anything about it. No verdict at the end, no summary, no conclusion. Look, and then put the phone down, and go and give your hands ten warm minutes of care, which is a separate act entirely and asks nothing.

The purpose is not to like the picture. The purpose is to be a person who can look at one, which is a different and much more useful thing, and which you were until about two years ago.

You are able to look at one photograph all the way to the end, and there has never once been a rule that a quarter of a second gets to decide what you see. The written word in Isaiah 46 says I have made, and I will bear, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman looking at a picture for the first time in two years.