Seeing Beauty Beneath

One of my favorite things is taking beautiful photos of the beautiful country God has placed around us. I love using my camera to capture these views. The Midwest is somewhere that isn’t easy to see the beauty right away. When I was in 8th grade we took a trip out west and drove through the flattest state in America  (or so I thought) and I swore I would never live there. 20 years later I love this land. Sometimes beauty is clear and sometimes it is not.

I grew up in the East. Trees everywhere. In the fall there were actually beautiful colors. We had mountains of snow, learned to go ice skating and skiing and we also got to ride with my dad in his plow truck.  In the summer, hot was like 90 degrees and Spring never actually started until May. All the farmers in the East said the corn should be knee high by the fourth of July. Out here in the Midwest if your corn is only knee high by the fourth of July your having a VERY bad crop and you had better think about another form of income. LOL

After I graduated high school I didn’t really have any plans. I worked for awhile and then decided to go to a camp that has an apprenticeship program for college students. I attended this camp for two years. Towards the end of my second year I was trying to figure out what to do next and the opportunity arrived for me to go to South Dakota for a year and be the head cook at a boarding school. So after I had a phone interview, I packed my bags  and  left for South Dakota. I had no idea where I was going or who I was working for but I had to solely trust God during this journey.

As I flew to Minneapolis and then got on the smallest commercial airplane I have ever flown in, I looked out the window as we were landing in the tiny town 1 hour from the school. All I saw was squares of land. I was really scared but also trusted this was what I was supposed to do. I thought to myself this is very flat. I totally didn’t even know the half of it. As we landed in the smallest commercial airport I’ve even been in I thought that this was going to be a fun adventure. It sure was! This opportunity prepared me for so much more in my life. There were bits of hilly areas in South Dakota that were beautiful. I began to appreciate the fields of sunflowers and the gorgeous sunsets.

It was this adventure that led me through my journey into the Midwest. During this year as the cook in this Christian Boarding school I learned about a small college in Wyoming. But is was another year before I decided to go to this college. Thankfully Gods plans are bigger than our own. He orchestrated my husband to be there the same year as me. 🙂 We met the first weekend we were there. One of the things we grew to love to do together was hiking in the canyons. Like South Dakota, Wyoming is flat but most of the time you look into the distance and see a huge bluff or rock formation on the horizon. This was breathtaking and I fell in love with the west and the plains even more. After a few months of being friends we began dating and got engaged in February of that year. We got married in July of the summer we had finished school.

When we were engaged I saw the area my husband lived and was too in love to realize this was the place we would live. We didn’t live in his home town the first year of marriage but we did end up moving here to the flint hills in Kansas. As I live here longer the land continues to grow on me. You can see for miles but I love that so much. You can see the entire sunset without the trees covering it up. God paints the sky in the Midwest almost every day for us to enjoy the site of it. The grass and prairie lands are so peaceful with the breeze blowing. My mom described it like this.  “Its almost like the ocean, you can see for miles and you can always see the horizon.” She said she loved the sound of the grass oscillating in the breeze. She loved the peacefulness it brought. I have also grown to love all these thing. Though in the summer I refer to the wind as a “blow dryer”. I do love the beautiful land God has given to us to enjoy.

A few years ago I saved enough money to buy a really nice camera. The main reason I purchased this was because I was tired of paying a lot of money for someone else to capture cute pictures of my family when I could do it myself just as good or better than someone I paid. I began taking photos of the landscapes and all kinds of things around this area. It has become something I love doing. The best part about having a love for photography is that your family is the perfect subjects to photograph. So now I want to share a handful of my favorite photos I have taken over the last few year.

I hope you enjoyed these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Signing off from one woman to another

Jenny Ren