I truly hate to see pictures of myself. They say the camera adds 10 pounds, but I’m pretty sure they meant to say 50, right? On the third day of our trip up to northern Japan to do relief work, I saw a particularly ugly picture of myself. And I saw it while sorting through pictures of tsunami victims.
After our morning exercises and breakfast (no grits today, we had bought donuts when we drove into the nearest town last night!), we got our day’s assignments. The men would be going to a local daycare center to clean up the yard and parking lot. The girls would be working on trying to preserve and salvage photographs that had been retrieved by the relief workers and clean-up crews. I was really excited about this day’s task! It was inside, for one thing, and something I felt I could handle.
After a brief training session, we walked into the strangest laundry room I’ve ever seen. In the center of the area stood laundry baskets filled with muddy photos and albums in various stages of disintegration. Strung across the room in all directions were laundry lines with hundreds of clothespins holding photographs. All had been damaged by seawater when the tsunami had snatched them up and deposited them in piles of debris. Some were beyond salvaging, but volunteers carefully handled each one and saved the ones they could by bathing them in fresh water and hanging them up to dry. Those found in the same album were then kept together and labeled in hopes they could be reunited with their owners.
Groups of 3-4 volunteers had chosen a basket of photos to work with. As I looked around, I saw a poignant display of photos including school pictures, pages of yearbooks, baby pictures, and wedding pictures. Where were these smiling people now? Obviously, their homes had been washed away or their pictures wouldn’t be here in this bizarre laundromat. Were they safe? Staying at an evacuation center or temporary housing? Or were they among the 28,000 who perished on March 11? Would these pictures ever be claimed, and, if so, who would be left to do the claiming?
We joined a Japanese volunteer in progress as she worked through her basket’s contents. As I started to peel the plastic album pages off the snapshots to bathe them in clean water, I looked at each image with curiosity. It didn’t take me long to realize that this particular batch of albums had come from a center for mentally challenged adults. We dove in and spent the entire morning at our exacting work. It was in this process of washing and hanging up hundreds of photographs that I discovered the ugly picture of me.
Though I had begun the day with enthusiasm, I found the work to be tedious and boring after a while. The photos I was working on were not particularly interesting, and the subjects were, quite honestly, not very attractive. Several years’ worth of this facility’s albums had been retrieved. Its staff members had documented each activity that the center had sponsored over the years.
At the lunchtime break, I wandered around the room looking at other groups’ projects. I saw a beautiful Japanese bride and her smiling groom, an adorable baby smiling up at his mommy, and a group of high school students doing a silly pose for the camera. To the volunteer next to me, I said, “Oh my goodness! I sure hope these people are all alive and safe!”
At that exact moment, the hideous picture of myself came into clear focus. I was shocked and sickened to realize that I had not had this same reaction to any of the photos I had been so carefully working to preserve this morning. I had honestly thought that I was here volunteering because I loved people. But in that moment, I saw just how messed-up my love is. Much to my shame, my “love” was about as far from the standard of God’s love as it could possibly get.
Of all of the things I experienced during this trip -- all of the sights, sounds, emotions, and lessons, this is the one I want to take with me for life. God loves people. All of them. Old and young, whole and broken, healthy and disabled, pretty and ugly. With all of my heart, I’m thankful that He does. If he didn’t love the unlovely, I would definitely be doomed.
After lunch, I went back to the photographs from the Hanamasu Center for Disabled Adults. As I washed and hung up each photograph, I used this time to repent and to pray for these beautiful people God loves.
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