Grounded……..

I’m at one of my favorite meetings of the year but I’m grounded today!  I came down with a stomach bug late yesterday and I felt I needed to ground myself today and recover while the gang is out shooting.  I always really enjoy these field trips, but better safe than sorry.  The good news is that the Nikon prep work for future meetings never ends so I’ll have a day in my hotel room to both recover and get some work done, so it’s not a day off, but I’m not complaining.  My talk to the group went really well yesterday!  I was able to sprinkle some humor into an otherwise dry, death by powerpoint presentation.  Thank you Lord for laughter!

Scott Kelby was our special speaker and, as usual, he hit it out of the park!  What a great teacher, friend, and partner to work with. He taught on workflow techniques with Camera Raw and Lightroom 4 and they were fantastic pieces of information.  As I said in yesterday entry, this is a really special group of folks and they are a lot fun to work with. A few of my old friends from this group didn’t make this years meeting and I sure missed them, didn’t seem quite the same without them around.  No one worked harder yesterday than Francis Yeh, our repair tech.  Francis did a ton of camera cleanings, and as usual the recipients of his fine service were thrilled!

When I went to bed last night, not feeling very good, I dropped off to sleep thinking about something I wanted to share.  I was thinking about how much of my life could have been better if I had only listened to God’s voice and obeyed.  Once you tell God you want him to come into your life and live in you, He takes that invitation very seriously!  From that moment forward, He wants to guide you into what is best for you and most glorifying to His kingdom.  The hitch comes when we don’t listen or willfully choose to go another direction.  The result is always the same, failure.  God is not a “better” way, He is the “best” way!  It amazes me how often I think I understand what’s best for me and make decisions that don’t line up with His will, I always suffer from that mistake.  What is utterly amazing, to me,  is that I know better and yet, still do it over and over.  I would like to think that the frequency of my going off the reservation is reducing, but sometimes, I wonder.  God gave us free will and He refuses to stop us from making bad decisions.  I believe it is part of the learning process.  As the late Mark Twain once said, “A man who takes a bull by the tail, obtains information that will always be useful!”

Let me encourage you to take the “best” path and prayerfully ask Him for guidance in all your decisions. One thing is for sure, He loves you too much to ever steer you in the wrong direction, the important thing for us, is to listen………

the pilgrim

* Photo Note:  The AV-8B Harrier II, above, was shot at sunrise at Sun n’ Fun this year.  It was shot on one of the first days I used the new D800, which I’ve fallen in love with!