I Have Sinned, Maybe.

I have sinned. I have acted out of alignment with God; that is sin, right? Webster's dictionary defines sin as "a condition of estrangement from God or any violation of God's will, either in purpose or conduct." As humans our sin runs rampant through all parts of our lives, leaving no sanctuary of the mind untouched. In Dante's Divina Commedia the liar and falsifier of what is true is sentenced to one of the deepest and most torturous circles of Hell; this is where Dante would have me. I have falsified the truth, I have distorted reality, and, most awfully, I have taken the beautiful creation of God and changed it to fit what I thought was truly beautiful.

As I hiked up the Echo Mountain trail in search of a memorable panaroma, I thought to myself how easy capturing beauty was in these majetic mountains. When I reached the end of my climb, I set up my tripod and scoped out my image through the viewfinder of my digital Nikon D70. The scene was simple, breathtakingly simple. It was a perfect mountain range that curved evenly around the point at which I stood, with an orange sun low in the western sky. My horizontals aligned and my tripod locked off, I smoothly captured five images with a slight overlap. With each open and close of the shutter I was sure my image was perfect; with each gentle press on the extension cable, I was excited to get to my computer and piece together my raw pixels. Within the hour I was doing just that, aligning the pixels and masking out all lens and angle distortions. My picture was beautiful because the last entity to touch my subject as a whole was God, the God, the mountain moving God. Nothing more needed to be done to the image; it was the best it could ever be. However, out of the darkness in my mind a thought came and whispered its lies and deceit. I guiltily boosted the saturation, the contrast, and warped the hues. I had violated and defiled the masterpeice of God. I have sinned.

I have sinned. I think I have. Maybe I have sinned. Or maybe I have not sinned. Maybe in my writing of a simple caption, I over dramatized the situation. Maybe. Maybe this is my sin nature talking when I say I still really like the "defiled image;" or maybe it is not. Maybe God likes my image. Maybe. Hopefully.