Snapshots

I’ve started and stopped and started again…a half-dozen messages and a thousand ways to share them.  The gentle rocking of the porch swing and a large spider I found comfortably lounging in my hair know more of my thoughts than you do; my radio sits silent and heavy on my belt this afternoon, with the students gone home and more arriving tomorrow.  Quiet Adirondack woods and the sun in patches on the white birches should inspire a proliferation of words, and instead I’ve found myself strangely mute, a victim of writer’s block in the heart of a writer’s paradise.

I've been sorting through hundreds of photos, taking myself back to a reality I left only three weeks ago, and replaying again the incredible transformations of body and spirit in generous answer to our prayers for life and hope.  

It’s impossible to share all the stories.  The immense heartache and fears and outcast lives…and the incredible hope and joy that can only be known when one has been utterly hopeless.  My brain is a jumble of before-and-after photos, Krio greetings giggled in little voices, the smell of bleach and Whiteheads packs and Ensure, wholehearted joyous dance parties to the beat of an enthusiastic two-year-old drummer, the weight of a small sweaty child drooling down my back as they sleep snuggled in tight...a series of still shots.

If I wrote ten thousand words I could not take you there completely.  If I post these photos will you turn away in horror and disgust at the marred faces and bodies of social rejects, the bare scars of poverty?  Will I only be trivializing the struggles of these precious hearts and putting their hidden shame on display?  


Blink, and look at them again through different eyes, as souls that hunger for transformed life and a renewed spirit, that long to be seen as someone of worth.