There’s an expression we’ve used a thousand times over.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
It’s a phrase that rings through the mind with each click of a button, fingertips scrolling across a phone, and the history displayed in the wooden cased photos in the family living room. Yet there’s a truth to those words that can strangely echo deep into our souls if we truly allow it.
For a short week, a fearless band of Americans and Filipino transplants ascended on a little corner of the globe, a grief stricken area of the Philippines known as Tacloban.
Just a short two months prior, a violent and horrific storm emerged from the oceans core and wrecked havoc on the shore and lives of the Filipino people that once called the area home. Typhoon Yolanda was fierce-beast-of-a-storm with a vicious hunger that roared and left a graphic trail of devastation, rising death tolls, and needs more substanial than the human stomach can handle.
Yet desperate the evidential despair, a community of hard working internationals came together for six days to see heaven invade earth in tiny silver of the world, a place desperate to hear the whispers of the Father?s heart breathe,
“You are not forgotten.”
For six days Kingdom came to invade earth in the form of hot meals, morsels of manna packs, the organization of supplies and donations, and sweat, tears and elbow grease poured into projects. It also came through the guidance of the Holy Spirit when footsteps were redirected to a labyrinth of bowed heads, sweet prayers, new faces and encounters that bit by bit draw us closer to the Father?s heart.
In the broken cement archway of what once resembled a home, we heard story after story of what should grasp our hearts with grief yet instead flooded them with the resounding hallujiahs that echoed the chorus of thanksgiving from the heavens above.
It’s often difficult to go, experience and move forward following something as impactful on the soul as disaster relief. Though our hearts swell in memory and thanksgiving, we simply click the silver buckle of the plane belt tightly around us and head home to the chaotic rhythms of our over scheduled life. Then in the quiet crevices of time, the hidden longings of our souls come alive as fingertips fall across the screen of our phones, a modern day 35mm. A brief but lasting glimpse of the photos and faces of the land and people our hearts have grown to love in so many unforeseen ways.
While the wreckage of a raging storm lay in the visual crumble of those pictures, we simple don’t see the anguish and grief that we were once so certain was there. Instead in the photo of a young girl’s toothless grin we remember her infectious giggles. The joy of songs and silly faces in a puddle filled back ally envelope our inner being and draw us closer into the Father’s heart.
We remember the mother, who through tears shared the fear that rose inside of her as the storm’s waters around her swelled, now desperate to provide for the four children who cling to her side. Yet her words became an echo of the prayer of hope rising up inside the both of us, allowing peace and jubilance to settle upon us. Her smile following the tears a beacon of the hope and joy that can bring sunshine on even the cloudiest of days in the Tacolaban.
Suddenly through a single picture, the floodgates open up from deep within and we remember the joy of a tiny corner of the globe, a place that could easily be forgotten, yet with the flashes of the mind the opportunity for both praise and the reminder of the joy sprung forth from the rumbles of grief.
A single picture. A thousand words.
We’re no longer left with the question of what impact did we make, we?re left knowing joy, receiving it. We press forward, marching to the anthem of our hearts poured out for the Philippines.
Bangon Tacloblan, you are not forgotten.
