I Take The Picture And Delete It

You know the sequence better than anybody else does, because nobody else has ever seen it.

Phone up. Front camera. One picture, sometimes three. A long look at the small square. And then delete, delete, delete, and the phone back in your pocket, and on with the afternoon.

Total elapsed time, about eleven seconds. Frequency, more than you would say out loud if somebody asked.

Here is the thing I want to start with, because it is the part nobody names. That sequence is not vanity. It has almost nothing in common with vanity. A woman taking a photograph she intends to keep is doing something entirely different from a woman taking a photograph she intends to destroy.

You are not collecting anything. You are checking something.

And the reason I want to be precise about it is that people who love you have probably been kind about the wrong thing. They have said you look fine, which answers a question you were not asking, and they have said do not be so hard on yourself, which is true and does not tell anybody what to do at four in the afternoon.

So let us look at the actual mechanism, because it turns out to be a strange one.

An audit that destroys its own paperwork

Think about what an audit is for.

Somebody checks something, writes down what they found, and the record goes on a shelf so that next time the question comes up, the answer is already there. That is the whole value of it. Check once, so the checking can stop.

Now look at what happens with the phone.

The picture gets taken. The finding is made. And then the evidence is destroyed immediately, so nothing goes on the shelf, so the next time the question arrives there is nothing to consult and the whole thing has to run again from the beginning.

That is not an audit. That is an audit that eats its own paperwork, and it will therefore run forever, because it never produces anything that can close a question.

You are running a check that was built so it can never finish, and eleven seconds with a phone has never once been able to settle anything. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman the shape of a loop she has been inside for years, and James 1 puts a man in front of a glass and shows him walking away with nothing.

Notice the second half of it, which is quieter.

The picture is never the point. If it were, one would have been kept by now. In ten years of doing this there would be a folder somewhere.

The point is the check. And a check that is never allowed to produce a record is not looking for information at all. It is looking for relief, and relief that has to be taken eleven seconds at a time is not relief.

You are asking a camera for something it does not carry, and a front facing lens has never once been able to hand over peace. Scripture in James 1 describes a man who looks and immediately forgets, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a woman out of the looking and into something that stays.

Beholding his natural face in a glass

James has a picture for exactly this, and it has bothered people for two thousand years because it seems so small.

For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. (James 1:23 and 24, King James Version)

Read what he objects to, because it is not the looking.

The man looks. That is fine. Everybody looks. What James finds strange is what happens next, which is nothing. He goes his way and immediately forgets what he saw, so the looking produced no change at all and might as well not have happened.

You are being described rather than accused, and James has never once been scolding the man who stood in front of that glass. James 1 diagnoses an arrangement that produces nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman out of a loop without laying a charge on her.

Hearing without doing, James says, works like that. All input and no landing.

Now bring that back to the four o'clock photograph. The looking has been happening for years. It has produced a great deal of feeling and not one single act.

You are somebody who has looked a thousand times and been asked to do exactly once, and the looking has never once been the thing that was going to change anything. It is written in James 1 that a man beholds himself and straightway forgets, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a woman from a hearer into a doer of one very small thing.

I want to be careful here, because James can be preached as a rebuke and that would be a misuse of him in this room.

He is not scolding the man at the mirror. He is describing an arrangement that does not work. The man is not wicked. He is stuck in a loop that produces no result, and the whole letter was written to get people out of loops like that and into one concrete thing they can do today.

You are being handed one small thing to do rather than one more thing to feel, and the burden for that has never once been yours to carry alone. The written word in James 1 moves a person from beholding to doing, and the Spirit of God is what makes an ordinary act into care rather than another correction.

What manner of woman

There is a phrase at the end of that passage that I would put on a wall.

Straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

Not what he looked like. What manner of man he was. James is not talking about a face at all. He is talking about the whole person, the kind of person somebody is, and the thing that gets forgotten in the loop is not an appearance. It is an identity.

That is what the four o'clock check keeps failing to deliver. It is aimed at a face, and the ache underneath it is about a self, and a camera cannot reach a self however many times it is pointed.

You are looking for what manner of woman you are and asking a lens that only holds surfaces, and it has never once been equipped to answer that. James 1 says the man forgets what manner of man he was, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman who she actually is when a screen cannot.

So here is what I would put in the place of the check, and it is deliberately not a rule about phones.

Do one ten minute thing for your body tonight, and take no picture of it.

Not before, not during, not after. No record at all. The absence of the photograph is not a punishment. It is the entire experiment, because a thing done with no image attached is the first act in years that has not been submitted for review.

You are able to do one act of care that no camera ever sees, and there has never once been anything owed to a lens for ten minutes of your own evening. The word in James 1 asks for a doer rather than a beholder, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in ten minutes that nobody photographs.