Can art...
  • a single photo,
  • a carefully crafted sentence,
  • a simple lyric and melody,
  • a brief video clip... change the world?

It’s a question I’ve been pondering lately.

In my breakfast room hangs a photo taken by my son, Todd, when he and I and my daughter Shauna traveled to Africa in 2003. Eight children dressed in rags stare at the camera. Siblings and cousins whose parents all died of AIDS, the children lived with their frail grandfather, who stood outside the photo. Todd snapped the picture at two in the afternoon. The kids had eaten nothing that day, and there was no food awaiting them. Because we were there by accident—detoured from our intended destination—we had brought no food to give them. In that moment, I hated who I was: a privileged American seeing desperate need and doing nothing. That wasn’t my intention, of course, but good intentions meant nothing in that moment. To those children, I was one more person witnessing their plight and turning my back.

The same photo hangs in my office, and one year I turned it into Christmas cards so my friends could see it too. Todd doesn’t consider himself an artist, but I believe that in a rural village in Uganda he became one—for me anyway—capturing a moment in time that repeatedly pulls me back to reality and truth. Every morning it reminds me of the plight of the world’s suffering children and of the vow I made on an April day five years ago to actively fight the injustice of extreme poverty and HIV/AIDS.


We who are entrusted with the gifts of words or melody or film or dance or paint, are also entrusted with a responsibility. To look unflinchingly at reality. To discern truth.

To let both the beauty and tragedy of the world break open our hearts. And ultimately, to let God use this process to change us, so that we can in turn become God’s humble, yet bold, agents of change in the world he loves so much.

---Lynne Hybels

1 comment:

  1. OH! A sucker-punch to the abdomen.
    I read this and felt guilty as well. THis lead me to think why is that my first response. I now want to seek service, understanding, mercy. . (I'm not quite sure).
    I want my first response to be joy in what the Lord has provided in that moment to share with those I have met/ seen on the journey.
    Missy

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