Some mornings in Uganda, my feet hit the tile silently, before chaos inevitably descended. I learned to open the gate with the least amount of disturbance, my flip-flops padding through the dust up our road. My heart hungered for the silence, the space to pray, to think alongside God.

Sometimes my Canon thumped against my skirt; just its presence seemed to affect my vision. I felt suddenly more conscious of beauty.

The red dirt of our lane only boasted only snatches of nature, flanked by three-meter walls of cement. Concertina wire or glass-bottle teeth studded each. I declared a “trash contest” for the kids more than once (“Biggest bag of trash gets a piece of candy! …After you wash your hands!”). And there was that time I jogged by a cat-sized dead rat.

Still, one morning, I glanced what I most hoped for: the blue S-curve of a heron’s neck in an open meadow. I edged my lens through the chain-link fence.

Checking the image I’d snapped, I glimpsed what I’d missed: that cinder-block backdrop to the heron. Oh, and the volleyball standard, i.e. cement-filled tire skewered with a pole leaning against the stately tree that looked so beatific each morning, arms spread skyward. Any photographer worth her salt checks her background, but I was surprised by what had eluded my sight. Suddenly what had looked so uplifting each morning had a bit of mortar slopped on top, a little trash garnishing the edges.

But isn’t that the arresting pleasure of time with God? Somehow, He swivels my eyes to savor with Him. Some call these “glimmers,” as in the opposite of “triggers”: snatches of wholesomeness, beauty, or life-giving delight.

As I think about Moses’ brash, awe-stricken prayer, “Please show me Your glory,” much of beholding that glory is about learning to see. If the “eye is the lamp of the body” and “if your eye is healthy your whole body will be full of light”—perhaps that’s why gratitude, our ability to see God working and creating all around us—is so tied to our worship.

That morning, I’d asked God if He’d show me what He was doing in my kids and my ministry; that I would peer beyond frustration to His good work.

Show me the heron and the sweeping tree boughs in a meadow hemmed by trash and cement. Show me You even as I squint through a small hole in a chain-link fence. In everyday grittiness—I long to see Your snapshots.