Finding God Through His Camera Lens

By Mike Matenkosky, Atwater, California

As appeared in

I sat on the porch staring into the backyard. I wanted to walk out there but I couldn’t. My legs hung from the edge of my wheelchair. I wasn’t paralyzed but I might as well have been. After years of pain and swelling in my knees my doctors had run out of options. A few weeks earlier they’d fused the second of my knee joints straight. The first had already been fused. I could walk, sort of, waddling like a penguin. But it was arduous. And there was no hope of improvement.

I raised my eyes to the hori­zon. I live in the Central Valley of California and on a clear winter day like this one you can see the Sierra Nevada Mountains in all their glory from my yard. For as long as we’d been married my wife, Stacy, and I had hiked deep into those mountains. We felt so close to God up there by the clear blue lakes and the windswept passes. It was holy ground for us.

Was. The doctors couldn’t tell me exactly what had gone wrong with my legs. Some sort of autoimmune disorder attacking my joints. I’d tried medication, physical therapy, even knee replacement. My body rejected the new knee. After years of joyously exploring the backcountry it was all suddenly and inexplicably over.

I gazed at the peaks shimmering in the distance. I thought back to our first hikes to the Chain Lakes in Yosemite, a trio of granite-bottomed lakes nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. We’d barely known what we were doing. We packed too much stuff and slept in a rickety discount-store tent. But we didn’t care. The mountains were a revelation. It seemed there was more sunshine up there, air so pure it made you want to stop and just breathe. At night the world became dark and silent. Stars blanketed the sky. You know that passage in the Bible about God moving over the face of the waters? Well, hike to a remote mountain lake and you’ll know exactly what that Scripture means.

I looked down and noticed that my knuckles were white gripping the wheelchair. I’ll admit it, I was angry. At the universe. At God. Why would such a good and holy thing be taken away from me? A few years back I’d even tried selling some of my nature photos at a craft fair. I worked in electronics at a research lab but I had a vague notion of maybe one day becoming a nature photographer. Not anymore. I felt estranged from God. I’d stopped going to church with Stacy and our two girls, Hannah and Sarah.

I was about to head back inside the house when something caught my eye. A sparrow darted down from the sky and landed on our bird feeder. A finch joined him. I’d never paid much attention to that feeder but I couldn’t help noticing how still the birds were as they perched there. On a whim I wheeled inside, got my camera and returned to the porch. I aimed the camera and pressed the shutter button. Hey, I thought, looking at the screen, not bad. I took a few more shots, then the birds flew away.

The next day I returned to the porch and watched. That bird feeder was popular! The Central Valley lies along a major flight path for birds migrating from the Arctic to Mexico. All sorts of exotic and beautiful birds passed through our backyard. Some were warier than others. I realized I couldn’t just sit there in plain sight. I draped the canvas cover from our grill over a walker and crouched down. The birds pecked away happily and I spent the afternoon taking photos. If I adjusted the lens right you couldn’t even tell the pictures were taken in someone’s backyard.

I looked up some of the birds online. There were gorgeously colored hummingbirds, a Nuttall’s woodpecker and something called a dark-eyed junco, which looked like it wore a tiny black hood. Not the same as hawks soaring over a remote mountain lake. But at least I hadn’t spent the last 24 hours feeling sorry for myself.