Faces Across Time - Atlanta

I found myself in Atlanta again but four days after my last journey there. Unlike my prior journey, which was for entertainment and frivolity, this one was sacred and assumed several dimensions.

My involvement with an Atlanta-based charity now finds me transporting children from the Shriner’s Hospital in Greenville, SC to Atlanta to prepare for return journeys to their home countries. Childspring International has as its mission the finding of children in the dark corners of the earth who are in need of radical life-saving surgery. Perhaps one hundred children a year are brought to Atlanta and then sent on to hospitals and host families throughout the United States for treatment that will save their lives or give them a new face or reconstructed limbs that will give them a chance at normal lives.

So it was today that I found myself taking a six-year-old boy from Haiti and a sixteen year old girl from the Philippines to Childspring in preparation for their return home. Olwitch was happily running around on his new feet. He will return to Haiti sans the wheelchair that has been a necessary part of his young life. Katrina will return to Manila and able to stand tall with her friends after having a severe scoliosis of her spine corrected.

Perhaps the most popular subject for artists throughout time has been the human face. The children at Childspring experience art of the highest order. Many of our children have fallen into cook fires in the developing world and had their faces burned away. Surgeons perform artistry on these children and create astonishing results that will rival anything painted by Rembrandt or Renoir or created in the dimness of antiquity. I stared with rapt attention at several pairs of before and after photos of children that have recently been given radiant new faces by dedicated plastic surgeons. Even though Olwitch and Katrina did not have their faces operated on, their faces were transformed by radiant smiles, knowing they would return home able to walk and stand tall.

After saying farewell to Olwitch and Katrina I found myself in the afternoon looking into a small blue face made of copper. Six thousand years of time elapsed since that face was created and I looked at it with focused attention. For an hour I viewed faces from the earliest reaches of recorded history. The Childspring offices happen to be across the street from a very large complex of buildings forming a great art museum. When I went across the street I also went across six millenniums. The High Museum was hosting an exhibition of antiquities from the Louvre in Paris. It was in the museum that I realized some things never change. Smiling faces are indeed our favorite subjects to apply our artistic talents to. One only has to think of the popularity of the Mona Lisa with its enigmatic smile in the Louvre or of the small copper face from 240 generations ago that was looking back at me through the glass today, or of the faces transformed by the modern miracle of reconstructive surgery.

Another thing that never changes is God’s love of Children. Just ask Olwitch or Katrina about that.