They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Maybe it is. But one picture doesn’t say it all.

And yet, in this world of perfect images, carousels, and reels they might say even more. They can speak of perfection and have-it-all-together perspectives. Of a life stacked full of perfect moments and mountain top views and milestones of achievements.

Life through the small lens of social media can be just that, an image.

A perfectly composed image, with the right white balance, form and texture and the aperture set open wide to create the illusion that light is illuminating all there is to see…but in fact the background is all blurred, creating that perfect bokeh, drawing eyes in to admire the likes of fine art.

One of our kids took this picture. It was a year ago, thanks to Google photo storage reminding me. And much of what you see here is true. This man has loved me like Jesus. And this life we get to live. Who could have imagined grace like this?!

But what you don’t see in this picture is that we are in the parking lot of the children’s hospital emergency room. It had been a hard summer. A hard season even. We thought it would do us good to take a short weekend trip out of town before school started. I had packed snacks — because I have learned that sitting in the back seat apparently makes children hungry. I picked up a new flavor of a protein bar we’d had before. And failed to read the ingredients. A rookie mistake for a parent who has been down this road before. It did have nuts one of our boys is severely allergic to. His body started rejecting it fast. We turned around.

And so there we were, in the parking lot of children’s hospital. Waiting and watching. One of the kids in the back seat took this picture of us.

And it reminds me that people are carrying a lot more than I can see. There is a lot more that makes up this broken life on this side of Eden than the pictures on social media. Or the pictures we construct in our heads of other people’s lives, through the small lens we might have into their lives, digital or not.

It reminds me to be gentle. To be kind. To be thankful that this digital age allows us to celebrate the highlight reels of someone on the other side of the world. To be thankful for beauty. For those perfectly composed images that draw our eyes in, tracing the lines and textures and melting our hearts even.

And yet, remember to leave space. Who knows? Maybe the image I have constructed of someone else’s life is just that, an image. A snippet in time. And it does not include the hospital parking lot. Or the waiting room. Or the other rooms people have had to walk through before they enter ours.

We don’t know the blurry parts of their lives. The parts that make them ache in private.
We might have been walking around as tourists the rest of the weekend. Maybe even portraying an image of a carefree and happy family. That is true. But we were also riddled with anxiety that a camera doesn’t capture no matter what you set the shutter speed to.

I see this picture and it makes me smile and ache in all sorts of good ways. Perhaps a picture might be worth a thousand words. But a thousand words don’t do justice to all the layers that make life.