A Photgrpahic Memory with Spiritual Implications

I’ve always been interested in taking photos. As a nine-year-old I took a picture of the partially constructed Space Needle. Impressed with the magnificent spillway, I aimed my Kodak Brownie camera at Grand Coulee Dam. The black-and-white snapshots were nothing to write home about, but I was hooked. Capturing “life as it happens” on film became a lifelong passion. Ask my family, I’m still taking more photos than most with my iPhone.

Shortly after our family moved to the Wenatchee Valley in 1964, I discovered something worthy of my camera’s lens. It was the outcropping of basalt rock in Swakane Canyon that bears a remarkable resemblance to our sixteenth President. All these years later, I still am fascinated by the natural rock formation. Most every trip we make to our lake house in Chelan, I quickly glance to the left to pay my respects to Honest Abe as we pass Rocky Reach Dam.

Recently I did some research to learn about this natural phenomenon unique to our area. What was created thousands of years ago by wind, weather and the intensity of geological activity captured the imagination of those who saw it. The indigenous peoples and Caucasian explorers in our region in the early 1800s identified the rock as resembling a human’s profile.

Speaking of taking photos of our famous landmark, just nine years after Washington became a state, a guy by the name of Charles Schoff took a photo of the rock formation from the deck of a Columbia River steamboat. Schoff was the engineer of the packet vessel named the Echo that ran between Wenatchee and Orondo. Curiously, a deckhand on the Echo by the name of Ed Ferguson was reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln at the time. Ed remarked to Charles that the face in the rock resembled the profile of the late President.

Schoff and Ferguson’s discovery caught on. The feature became known to crew members and passengers traveling down the Columbia River as Lincoln Rock. Four years later, the July 1902 issue of The Ladies Home Journal featured another photograph of Lincoln Rock. This one was taken by a photographer by the name of M. P. Spencer. His black-and-white headshot appeared as part of an article titled “Rocks That Have Faces on Them.” From that point on, the face overlooking the Wenatchee Valley had national recognition. It would take nearly eighty years, however, before Lincoln Rock State Park would be officially recognized as a tourist attraction.

What I find fascinating is that long before Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809, his likeness as an adult would be visible to inhabitants and passersby of our area. Half a century later in 1859, our beloved leader had no idea that his face was viewable on more than just printed campaign posters. When he died six years later, he was unaware that his profile would be the subject of amateur photographers like me a century in the future.

I also find it fascinating that Lincoln Rock pictures for me the process of spiritual maturity. Just as the image of Lincoln was created through extreme natural disasters like windstorms, seismic shifts and geologic trauma, so too my faith is shaped through hardships and heartaches. The God I worship is using the difficult circumstances in my life in constructive ways so that I will increasingly look like Jesus. And we all relate to the pain that accompanies spiritual growth.

In a letter to the early Christians in Rome, Saint Paul reflects on the purpose of suffering in the lives of believers. In that well-known passage where the Apostle talks about “all things working together for good,” he looks back to what God saw long before anyone else had a clue. Saint Paul asserts that those God foreknew He predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29).

In other words, God saw the finished result of our being shaped into the likeness of Jesus even before we were born. And whenever I pass Lincoln Rock on my way to Lake Chelan, I have a visual aid to remind me God is still at work in my life.