Lift Up Your Eyes

John 4:35 (ESV)Do you not say, "There are yet four months, then comes the harvest? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.

My favorite photographic subject is fall color. I am blessed to live near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the most beautiful displays of fall color on the planet. During leaf season, I love to get in the car, drive around the park, and let the photography come to me. A few years ago, on one of these drives, I pulled off at a turnout with a stunning view of the Chimney Tops, bare granite rising out of a range built almost entirely of forest. Below the peaks, that forest was on fire with red and orange, and I made a few frames I was happy with. Keepers.

Before I moved on, I remembered something I learned from photographer Jay Maisel. He said, "If the light is great in front of you, turn around and see what it's doing behind you."

I turned around. The sun was low behind the trees, and golden sunlight was pouring through the sugar maples and yellow birches along the road, lighting each leaf from behind so it glowed against the dark trunks. It took my breath. The pictures I made in the next few minutes were better than anything else I got that day.

In John chapter 4, the disciples had come to get something too. They were walking with Jesus, north from Judea to Galilee, and the road took them through Samaria. Around noon they stopped at Jacob's well, outside the town of Sychar. Jesus was tired from the walk and sat down to rest by the well while the disciples went into town to buy food.

While they were gone, a woman met Jesus at the well, and her conversation with him changed her life. She hurried home with a message: "Come and see." Now the townspeople were coming out across the fields toward him. The disciples returned from the town with food, but Jesus looked past them at the road.

"Rabbi, eat," they said. Jesus answered, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." The disciples looked at one another. "Has anyone brought him something to eat?" Then Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work." And he turned their attention from the bread in their hands to the grain in the fields.

"There are yet four months, then comes the harvest" sounds like a farmer's saying, a way of telling each other it isn't time yet. Jesus doesn't argue with the calendar. He says, "Look."

The word John uses is idou. It isn't a word for quiet observation. It gra