[caption id="attachment_5606" align="alignnone" width="323" caption="(Photo by Thomas Hurst)"][/caption] A young Haitian girl carries water across a schoolyard dirt soccer field to a small set of stairs that led to a slum where she lived in the hills above Port-Au-Prince on Tuesday, Jan. 19, one week after a 7.0 earthquake struck the capital. Thomas Hurst is a Pulitzer Prize-finalist photojournalist who currently serves on staff at Mars Hill Church and was part of a team that traveled to Haiti on behalf of Churches Helping Churches. Look for more posts in coming weeks from Thomas as he shares his thoughts on particular images he took and moments he and the team experienced in their 32 hours on the ground in earthquake-ravaged Port-Au-Prince. Watching this little Haitian girl walk past me, I was caught by how "cute" the moment was: how "cute" the small jug of water sat on her head, how "cute" she swayed back and forth as she made her way home. In a split second, I had projected an entire story in my head about her: "She was probably filled with little childlike pride as she would finally prove that she too was able to do the work of her much older sisters and mother. How excited she was to reach her home, dreaming in anticipation of how the older women would encourage and affirm her …" Funny how quickly the mind paints backstories to what we see, how quickly our minds want to wrap everything we believe the world should be, think, or feel into a nice little box tied with a pretty little bow. But just as quickly as I had painted this picture in my mind’s eye, what had appeared "cute" was swept away by a deep sadness.

Childhood Daze

As God has done so many times before, he quickly peeled back the scales from my eyes and my heart to reveal to me the truth: This wasn’t a little Haitian girl playing grown-up; this was a little girl forced to be a grown-up. Her steps were not that of a carefree child skipping down neighborhood sidewalks, or running pitter-patter down the long hallways of her home. Her feet were not gliding through blades of grass. Instead, she was slogging it out in the dirt and rocks, lumbering, trudging, and fighting for every step. Her shoulders would burn from the strain of the heavy bottles, her hooked fingers would cramp around the narrow handles. She would be carefully minding each step. She would arrive at a home built of salvaged sheet metal, where the open kitchen would be next to the open toilet.

Great Expectations

As my fingers focused the lens and pressed the shutter, my mind wrestled with the reality I was shooting: a little girl tasked with duties far beyond her years, not just training for her future–this was her future. As she grows, her weight and burdens will grow larger and her opportunities and innocence smaller. Apart from Christ, I cannot bear the weight of the brokenness I see at home and abroad. Yet, in Christ, I can rejoice in the truth–his truth: This is not her home, this is not my home, this is not your home. Home is in God’s kingdom, and here, in this world, we are just strangers in a foreign land. "For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him."

1 Thessalonians 5:9-10