I realized this morning after posting my "finding humor in the week where there is SO much to do" blog, that so many of you may not really know what faithbooking is - one of the blessings that God has planned for us to do during our special time with His children at the Village of Hope.
See, you may read "faithbooking" and not really understand the depth of that term...we throw around the word "faith" all the time and scrapbooking was such a craze for so many years, that you might possibly think this is just some kind of "fun" scrapbooking activity, but if you look into the eyes of Beatrice Adufu...the beautiful little girl above, you will start to get an idea of what we are called to do while having the undeserved blessing and honor of loving on her in 8days and leaving her the gift of faithbooking.
God in his sovereignty planned for 2 of my dear friends to be at the Village of Hope over the past 2 months and they took pictures for us so we could develop and take with us over 300 pictures of the children whose eyes we will look into in person in a few days. Pictures are another thing we as americans take for granted, as they are stuffed in boxes and now hidden in our computer memory, and we, i feel, have missed the miracles and the blessings that our photographs contain.
We will have the honor of helping Beatrice and her friends take their pictures and look at them through the eyes of Jesus. To see what's really there...an amazing child of God - a beautiful creation with no flaws, the beauty in a sunset and in the ocean just yards away from their village, the blessings that surround them in their friends and their house parents who love them unconditionally, the miracles they have seen, the God-worth that they have (because we all know self-worth is just that, "self" worth).
Faithbooking is looking around at everything you see, through God's eyes. It's taking pictures - that specific moment of the creator's artistry that gets forever captured, and writing the powerful truth of what that picture represents, the vision that it captured, the memory that God wants them to have that they will now have documented forever, the photograph or drawing that reminds us all of the beautiful things God has created that our eyes are blessed to gaze upon and finally, the TRUTH of who we are to God, our true identity in Jesus Christ. These are the things our photographs tell us, but until we look at them through the eyes of God, we only see the earthly. We are going to share with these beautiful children, the eternal blessings that their photographs represent and how they can take pictures now through the eyes of God.
We most likely won't finish their faith albums, and truthfully, that is not our prayer. Our prayer is to teach them a holy habit of documenting their blessings and their faith along side their photographs that they have now, and that they will take in the future, so they can have a tangible reminder of the praise worthy deeds of the Lord forever.
When we leave, our hearts will be blessed knowing that these children will have their very own faith album that they will continue working on. They have in their rooms an album that they will be able to turn the pages of and read the words beside their photographs over and over again of the truth of who they are and how big the God is who created them for a very specific purpose and who loves them more than they could ever begin to imagine....
that is faithbooking...and i'm fairly sure, after our time with these precious children in ghana, my eyes will never look at faithbooking the same again...
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