This morning, it was grey and cloudy. Looking straight ahead through the windshield it seemed a fairly uniform grey. Yet as I looked up through that tinted part of glass at the top of the windshield, the contrast was enhanced and the contours of the clouds appeared. My mind wandered back to my childhood. I remembered looking through sunglasses and being struck at how different things looked. This was especially the case with polarized sunglasses.

In junior high school, I joined the photography club and started developing pictures. I learned about burning in the clouds to similarly increase contrast by underexposing or overexposing different parts of the photograph.

It’s all about how you look at things. I guess this applies back to my blog post yesterday, as I talked about postmodern biblical studies and checking your privilege. Technology provides us new ways of looking at things differently. Wearing Google Glass, I’m more aware of opportunities to capture an image. Using special lens for my cellphone which I got for Christmas, I’ve started my deconstructed selfies series of Instagram photos to look at faces different.

Perhaps this also provides a way of thinking about Lent. It is a time to repent, to turn around, to look at things differently. Technology can be a distraction from looking at what is around us, but it can also be a tool to see things differently.