Vulture and Child—What’s a Christian to Do?

Scared by Tom Davis

Eight years ago, I grabbed my teachers’ edition textbook, preparing for the next unit of Humanities 101. Flipped to Photography, which I knew little about. Oh, well. That’s when you engage with a subject, right? My eyes fell on Kevin Carter’s photo, “Vulture and Child.”

A boulder throttled my esophagus and crashed into a knotted stomach.

I scanned black-and-white words, a color photo, to snatch meaning.

Kevin Carter. Sudanese child creeps, turtle-like to food center. Nearby bird of carrion salivates for flesh and blood. Kevin Carter. Pulitzer Prize. Kevin Carter. Suicide.
My eyes close. I beg for an image of Mother and Child to replace that of “Vulture and Child.” Oh, God, it’s too much pain. Too much sorrow.

These are your brothers. Your sisters. My children.

My eyes blink open. I have shoved into a shadowy netherland the things that don’t lap my golden-sand shores. I have ignored the lands where millions upon millions are groaning for God. These lands do not hold the sparkling sand dollars and glistening conch shells I so love to gather and place on the shelves of my pretty little house.

"Father, forgive me. I have known what I do."

In his novel Scared, Tom Davis, author, theologian, president and CEO of Children’s HopeChest, has yanked open the doors of suffering from an African country “on the edge of the world.” Protagonist Stuart Daniels, an award-winning photojournalist, reels from the afterglow of success: a teetering marriage, self-doubt, pity, and debt. How can a just God allow such things as he has captured through his fancy lenses?

Unanswered questions shove Stuart back into the very dark places he opened up, then stitched closed with a fast-lane life. Will Stuart find redemption in the face of yet another shutter-shattering image, in the bylines of yet another story of yet another unutterable misery?

Unutterable misery. Stop talking about it like that. Utter it. Now.

*1.02 billion of the world’s people are hungry (www.bread.org).
*Every five seconds, a child dies from hunger (ibid).
*Over 15 million children are AIDS orphans (http://www.worldvision.org/).
*One out of every three women will be abused during her lifetime, with rates reaching 70% in some countries (http://www.blogger.com/www.womenthrive.org.).

Eight years ago, I viewed Carter’s “Vulture and Child.” Last week I read Davis’s Scared. During the interim, You’ve opened doors, Lord. Some rooms I’ve peeked into. Entered. Engaged with the things inside. More times I’ve tarried at the threshold, then wheeled and sprinted back to my sun-dappled beach.

Lord, make me answer for every door closed. Every dollar hoarded. Every book not read.

Dear friends, I am shouting from the podium of an educator. I am screaming from my writer’s chair. I am sobbing from my mother’s heart. Preaching from my Christian soul.

Dear friends, let us engage with those subjects we have avoided. Let us buy books about faraway places that shudder our gut, cringe our limbs.

Let us pull well-written, relevant books like Davis’s Scared off bookstore shelves! Let us stomp out the chatter crowing, “Christians just won’t read international fiction, about missionaries, about ‘those people’ with funny-sounding names who live in funny-sounding places and have awful-sounding problems.

“Father, forgive me. For I have known what to do. Engage me. Now.

For more information, visit http://www.scaredthebook.com/. Tom Davis' blog is http://tomdavis.typepad.com/.

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