{Beauty Unfiltered}
Sometimes the reality of life on The World Race becomes slightly skewed through the filters of social media. Most blogs feature the BEST moments through stories, videos compile the most EXCITING experiences, and pictures capture the HAPPIEST smiles and most BEAUTIFUL scenes from around the world.
A few days ago, I posted the photo below on Instagram of the view from my precisely placed ENO hammock…on the rooftop of my Cambodian townhouse overlooking a river surrounded by hundreds of multicolored houses.
– 54 'likes', a lot of probable misconceptions, many 'WOW's and several 'I'm so jealous of your life..' 's later…I came to realize what a false and romanticized visual this had provided to my friends and family. After thinking about how we often live in such a falsely advertised world, I put down the iPhone, grabbed my camera with the super zoom lens, and decided to give you a closer look… an unfiltered look at what I really witness.. and smell.. from my fourth story rooftop.
The lovely river that you saw there in the first photo… that water is actually very thick, and black… it is full of raw sewage and debris from the nearby dump.
(Piles of trash pouring into the river)
And what lies below and in between all of the brightly colored town houses.. are tiny scrap metal shacks packed into any little space that they can fit. You can hardly breathe as you walk outdoors, through the streets lined with trash in our sweet little neighborhood. As we walk to the orphanage each day, we are greeted at the entrance to almost every little shack by small half-clothed, shoeless children with huge smiles and even bigger voices shouting 'hello!' as we walk past.
The director of the orphanage that we are working with explained to us that these children living in this neighborhood are known as 'the children of the dump' because their parents send them out each day to the dump to gather plastic bottles so that they can sell them to make money. Most of the children don't go to school, and many of them don't even have shoes.. but if they do, they will share them as they walk to and from the dump carrying their collections from the day. The children will take turns walking ahead wearing the shoes, and then throw the shoes back to the other so that they can wear them and catch up.
(Carrying their collected plastic bottles along the riverside. The children have no shoes on. And raw sewage is pouring from the pipe.)
This is sadly the reality that the beautiful people here live in. The situation is not as glamorous as you may have imagined if you had only seen the instagram photo from my hammock view. By looking at that photo, you can't tell that I have to hold my breath if the wind is at all blowing my way.. or that it is unbearably hot and humid and out of the question to lounge there except for a brief time at dusk when the sun is starting to go down.. but not down quite far enough for the swarm of mosquitos to turn into a giant army of monster mosquitos.
We've all heard the saying 'A picture is worth a thousand words..' But on social media today, most pictures are described in 140 characters or less. It is so simple to paint false portraits of our lives by adding a few filters, a happy quote, and a click.. so of course we want to post the most glamorous moments, most stylish outfits, and the ever so perfectly enhanced scenery… because who wants to see a photo of stinky trash, and a sewage river?
As I was finishing this blog, I had two of my teammates walk down to the riverside with me. They didn't make it ALL the way down.. but holding my breath the whole way, I went down to snap a quick close up photo to show the actual consistency and color of the river. As I positioned myself on one knee.. getting the best photography angle of course, and started to snap the picture.. I realized that my camera wasn't focused on the water at all.. it was focused on a beautiful red flower that was growing right out of the sludgy black sewage bank between my lens and the water. I took the picture and realized that this was Gods way of showing me that there is still beauty here.. and He doesn't need a filter at all. You don't have to alter peoples perceptions of things to show them the beauty. You can find beauty in all circumstances and situations. He can make something as beautiful as this flower grow from a river full of poo! This picture.. definitely worth 1,000 words.
My team and I are sharing our stories with each other this week, and it is so encouraging to see that we are each growing into the beauty that Christ has created us to walk in. And just like the flower in the photo, we all have some junk in the background.. and we are continuously growing stronger, and more vibrantly because of it.
-MK
