We all know the scenario– you’re at the hairdresser/doctor’s office/grocery store and you’re waiting for some task to be finished, so the lovely employee you’ve never met before asks you “So, what do you do?”
“Oh, I work as a photographer/videographer for a Disaster Relief organization called IDES.” It’s usually a pretty good conversation starter. But in the last couple months, I’ve noticed a new trend.
After the initial question, most people ask about if I’ve been involved with Hurricane Helene efforts. To which I reply that yes, IDES has been doing some absolutely AMAZING work in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida. And I had the incredible privilege of tagging along with our first volunteer crew to get photos and video about a week after the storm hit.
But almost every time this conversation happens, the follow up response is, “Oh wow, that has to be so hard for you, working with ‘that’ all the time!”
I’m never quite sure how to respond. Because on the one hand, I don’t want to diminish the brutality of the situations that IDES works in. On that trip to Tennessee, I saw some homes covered in mud– one or even two feet deep, others where the walls had literally been pulled apart, and others that were simply gone. On international trips, I’ve seen people living in horrifying conditions, suffering from curable conditions, and lacking in basic necessities.
But at the same time, a lot of my trip to Tennessee was spent riding in a car with Rich Riley, one of our disaster coordinators, who passed the time attempting to improve my music tastes. A lot of my time on international trips is spent getting to know our partners, hearing what’s going on in their day-to-day lives. There’s a lot of decidedly unglamorous moments of wandering through gas stations comparing snacks, hanging out in hotel rooms figuring out how to charge all of my batteries, and curling up around my backpack and camera gear to snatch a quick nap in the car. So it feels disingenuous to describe my job like I’m some great hero for doing what in many ways is a pretty easy job, compared to so many people.
My younger brother, also a filmmaker and photographer, took two trips to Ukraine last year to film a feature length documentary about how the Ukrainian people are living life in wartime. Yes, there were points where my college-aged brother was mere miles from the Russian front-line. But also, he sent a lot of photos of him and his team sitting in a Ukrainian mall eating cinnamon rolls.
The week after I got home from Tennessee, my boyfriend was in Mexico for a week to help out some missionaries running an orphanage. Upon returning, one of his biggest comments was that the missionaries were just ordinary people. The work they were doing was absolutely amazing, but they were just normal people, faithfully following God’s call on their life, one step at a time.
God doesn’t work through larger than life characters enacting miracles through their own power. He works through normal people taking small steps of faith. Great things often feel ordinary or mundane when you’re actually in the middle of accomplishing them. It’s often not until you’re sitting in a waiting room somewhere telling a stranger your story that you realize just how amazing it is. And that’s because it’s not YOU that’s extraordinary. But rather it’s an extraordinary God working through ordinary people doing ordinary things to accomplish His extraordinary plans.
And, being a very, very ordinary person myself, I find that pretty incredible.
Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (NIV)