I am in Russia right now, leading a team from our church to do ministry in the town of Ufa, Bashkortostan. Yesterday, however, we all had the opportunity to visit the Russian WWII Memorial in Moscow. It was a somber experience seeing pictures and video footage of the plight of Russians fighting for their freedom against Hitler and his armies. In the Museum were lots of artifacts from that long conflict, but there were some pieces of Art that struck my deeply…
Here is one. I don’t know what it is called, but I had to have a picture of it as it spoke so many things…
Doesn’t this picture make you thankful?
Filed under: Church, Odd's & End's
What a moving picture! When touring Europe with a teen music tour, we would take the kids to a concentration camp in Germany. One time a teen’s grandfather who helped liberate one of the camps (Dachau) shared his testimony and pictures with us. There are images and pictures burned into my brain, that I wish I could get rid of. . . It certainly adds perspective to life. It’s hard for me to get upset now when my computer doesn’t work, I’m stuck in traffic, or I can’t get my clarinet students to play their chromatic scale. It just doesn’t seem all that important anymore.
I guess it’s the same kind of spiritual perspective we should have. When focused on God and heavenly things, little earthly frustrations (things that seem so important at the time) just really don’t matter; at the same time a spiritual perspective adds an urgency to life to spend every minute serving God, because our time on earth is so short.
While the painting speaks of the crushing burden of poverty, it also speaks to me of God’s hand in a family that literally pulls together in the face of poverty. Contrast this with the plight of families throughout America today and you see the marked difference that faith, or the lack thereof makes. We are an “advanced” society, but we have not conquered poverty, hunger, disease or any of the other age-old threats to well being (our advancements seem to be limited to isolation and insulation). Instead, this nation increasingly turns away from God, and the most telling symptom is the splintering and disintegration of the family. You will be hard pressed to see a scene similar to this in our nation, but it wouldn’t be for the lack of poverty.