Words And Pictures

Words and Pictures

As a little girl, my favorite hours in school were spent in the library with my nose pressed into the pages of a book. In elementary school I made a beeline for the books with a Caldecott Medal on the cover: they were the ones with the most beautifully illustrated stories. Once I began reading chapter books, the illustrations took a backseat to the rhythm of words on each page. Pictures were nice but no longer essential.

I’d almost forgotten the importance of words and pictures when a new friend reminded me over plates of breakfast tacos and cups of steaming coffee. He had brought along a book that contained a true story of his father, with the pages marked that bore his dad’s name. Like the book nerd I still am, I was delighted to read the words—but my friend had also tucked a dozen or so photographs of himself and his father inside the book. Together the words and pictures told his story. That’s what words and pictures do.

Near the same time, another friend read a story to me that I’ve been drawn to more than once—the story of a woman with a chronic illness that medicine had not healed. But she’d heard of a man who might help her, and she was determined to risk getting close enough to him to find out. This woman followed Jesus into a crowd and with one well-timed touch grasped the hem of his cloak. She thought she was unseen, but he felt power spill from his body to her need that miraculously made her well. She was caught—not in shame but in affirming, healing love.

The same friend who read this story asked me to picture it, and I tried. But I couldn’t quite imagine how it was. No matter: two days later another friend e-mailed a picture of what I’d tried to conjure but couldn’t. That faith-filled reach toward powerful goodness . . . I can see it now.

Words are good. I make my living with them, and they are my first love. But pictures tell the story like nothing else I know.

The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:14, NASB