I got a little bit lost one day in Guatemala. I was only lost for a couple of minutes, but it was during this time that I took one of my favorite photos from the entire trip. It ended up becoming one of my moments. As our group snaked its way through the narrow alleyways of Santiago, we became widely spread out. We were on our way to visit a sponsored family and my mind was reeling at the life lessons I was learning. I believe my distracted mind lead me to make a wrong turn. I came around a narrow corner and realized the people I thought I had been following were nowhere to be found.
I stopped where I was and looked at the scene you see in the picture above. I found myself staring down a narrow alleyway. Two children peered up at me, the stranger that just stumbled into the very place they call home. The little boy had been walking towards me, headed for the small staircase at my feet. When he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. I found the scene so surreal and strangely beautiful. That’s why I took the photo. Just before taking the picture, I used one of the very few words of Spanish I actually know.
“Hola,” I said, and then I smiled.
The little girl was tenderly cradling a dirty doll that had no clothes. When I spoke, she looked up at me with those beautiful eyes and gave me another hearty dose of Guatemalan smile. As always, my soul was lifted to a place where God can be felt. The little boy, it would turn out, wasn’t as quick to smile. But I wasn’t about to give up on him.
Since I had arrived in Guatemala, I had yet to find a child that wouldn’t return a smile. In fact, most of them were the first to smile. I looked at this little boy standing with his hands buried cautiously in his pockets, his face as serious as any I had ever seen. I knelt at the top of the small stone staircase and pointed at my camera, smiling and trying to convey my desire to capture a smile of his in a photograph. He stood, expressionless.
And so I did the only thing I knew to do – I just kept on smiling. I knelt there like a smiling fool, hoping this child would find the courage to smile back. After a moment, I started to see it. The corners of his mouth began to move. I saw the subtlest evidence of a smile, so I took another photo.
After taking his picture, I turned my digital camera towards him, inviting him to look at the photo of himself. We had learned that children in Guatemala love to see their photos. Most families have no photographs at all, and they certainly don’t have cameras. He crept to the stairs, hands still in his pockets, and looked at the image of his almost-smiling self.
And that is when I received the very thing I had hoped for. He looked down at the photo of himself, and I watched as the brightest, broadest, and most infectious smile spread across his face. He looked from the camera to me and back again, the smile I had known was in him never left his face.
The smiles we were offered during our time in Guatemala were a gift to all of us. Words simply cannot describe the effect that the smiles of the poor can have on the hearts of the materially wealthy. When I stood up to leave, that little boy was still smiling. I would have taken a picture for you to see, had my heart and mind not been contemplating the gift I was given.
Because of the smiles of those two children, I was overcome by the undeniable presence of God. I stood in the midst of their poverty, my heart overwhelmed by a depth of love I have never before experienced. The love God holds for the poor spills forth into the world through the grace of their smiles. I stumbled into that grace, lost in in an unfamiliar town. The smiles of two children found me there. And by their grace, I found the love of God. It became a moment for me that no photograph could capture.
I could finally see what was missing from my life. In the midst of their poverty and because of their smiles, I could finally understand the poverty of my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment