I have seen children look more like old men, with haunting eyes revealing the hardships of life. Children look at me with hunger that reaches far deeper than their stomachs.
Over the last two months I have compiled close to two thousand photos capturing what is right in front of me. I have sat behind my camera, waiting for “the shot”. The one that makes you stop and stare. To wonder how all the elements aligned perfectly to give you a photograph that says a million words, while saying nothing at all.
The camera became my muse, allowing me to manipulate it with the hopes of getting every shot from God. I passed up our ministry of playing with the kids to take photos. I let relationships dwindle so that I wouldn’t miss anything for the ‘scrapbook’. I loved getting the perfect shot each day, hearing the praise from my teammates and knowing they would be sharing my photos with the world. I was living each day of ministry to be praised, I was living each day to be noticed.
It took a moment of feedback for me to realize how much my photos were inhibiting my connections. Yes, God wants me to document his kingdom and children, but he doesn’t want me waste this year of my life when I could be living it. No matter how many times I look back on a photo that I took, it will never mean as much as it did when I saw it with my own eyes. God has given me the perfect camera, without the need to carry all the equipment, He has given me the eyes to see the picture and see the truth for myself.
The feedback challenged me to live in the present, and appreciate where we were right now. I made the choice to be strategic on when I took my camera to ministry, the photos would be instead made into memories.
God is perfectly planning each photo I take. He has shown me what He wants me to see, the beauty in the pain, the joy in the confusion and the hope in the hopeless. He has changed the ways I use my lens to show the truth, not what I want to see. When I look into the lens I see life. The beautiful life God has created for his beloved children.
Every child in these photos has the desire to be loved, they run to us each day with arms wide open ready to be embraced, lifted off the ground, spun around and smiled at. The kids bring so much life to my heart, they can always turn my frown around. When I get overwhelmed with the hurt and the poverty that surrounds me, the kids who are living what I see, are also the ones who remind me it doesn’t define them. For everything they don’t have in their pocket or at their home they do have in their spirit.
