It ended just past 10.  I didn’t look at the clock when it began.  I’m sure the viewing of the Israel pictures the other night went on longer than my captive audience cared to watch, but oh well, they were captive…  and I was only up to Masada.  Couldn’t stop then!  I’m sure I violated my long-standing philosophy on presentations:  “Leave them wanting more…”

I first tested this philosophy on my mother.  As she and I were viewing people floating in the Dead Sea, ready to move on to the ruins of Qumran and the sycamore tree of Jericho, we were presented with a dilemma – keep looking a my Israel pictures or eat Sunday dinner? You guessed it… she was wanting food more than photos.

The 1st photo of the Israel trip.

So there we were the other night… and… I’ll admit it.  I started right at the beginning, from the logo of the school that was the trip starting point and ended with the rainy, foggy, blurry image of Chicago through the bus window on the ride home… and every stinkin’ picture in between.  We sat through them all.

The last photo of the Israel trip.

That’s not all…  I showed the pictures off the camera’s memory card and not from the chosen ones – refined, artfully cropped and now stored on my computer.  I knew from the beginning that I had bitten off more than most of us could chew.   So there I was sitting with my camera attached to the TV, thumbing the button, advancing the pictures.  “… and here’s the Dead Sea… and the Dead Sea… now we have the … Dead Sea.  Look here’s a picture of the Dead Sea taken three seconds after the previous one.  Notice the subtle changes in lighting that reflect a changing…. blah, blah, blah.”  You get the uh, picture.

It’s so easy to take pictures these days. Point. Shoot. Point. Shoot.  Again and again. No film to fuss with, no processing expense. It’s nearly impossible to fill up a memory card, a digital warehouse of memories.  For an event such as this Israel trip the potential is great to take home hundreds, if not thousands of images!  What do you do with them all?  Show them to people, of course!  Remembering to show restraint and  ‘leave them wanting more.’

So there we were, photos by the hundreds flashing across the TV screen, on and on and on and on…  Then, just before tendonitis of the thumb set in, I noticed that we were getting to the end… Gethsemane… Garden Tomb… our final lessons… communion… and then rainy, foggy, blurry Chicago. At that point, I knew that I had fulfilled my presentation philosophy, at least for me.  Strangely, as we reached the photo finish line, when we reached that last picture on the memory card, for me it just wasn’t enough.  It left me wanting more.