Taking up our “Cross”
It was the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese War: A nine-year old girl with outstretched arms, running through her village screaming, her naked skin burning from a Napalm explosion.
The haunting photo was taken by Nick Ut on June 8, 1972. The photo was picked up immediately by news media around the world and would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
The little girl in the photo, Kim Phuc Phan Thi, is now a 59-year-old wife and mother living in Ontario. She remembers that day 53 years ago:
“Nick changed my life forever with that remarkable photograph. But he also saved my life. After he took the photo, he put his camera down, wrapped me in a blanket and whisked me off to get medical attention. I am forever thankful. “Yet I also remember hating him at times. I grew up detesting that photo. I thought to myself, “I am a little girl. I am naked. Why did he take that picture? Why didn’t my parents protect me? Why did he print that photo? Why was I the only kid naked while my brothers and cousins in the photo had their clothes on?” I felt ugly and ashamed.”
In the wake of the photo’s publication, Kim became a propaganda tool for the Communist government, paraded before the world as a symbol of the horrors of the war being inflicted on the Vietnamese people. Kim has struggled to make people understand that she and other survivors in such photographs “are not symbols. We are human. We must find work, people to love, communities to embrace, places to learn and to be nurtured.”
Kim eventually resettled in Canada where, with the help of her husband, friends and a newfound Christian faith, she realized her mission. She founded the Kim Foundation International, which provides medical and psychological assistance to children who are victimized by war.
“I know what it is like to have your village bombed, your home devastated, to see family members die and bodies of innocent civilians lying in the street. These are the horrors of war from Vietnam memorialized in countless photographs and newsreels. Sadly, they are also the images of wars everywhere, of precious human lives being damaged and destroyed today in Ukraine.”
“I have carried the results of war on my body. You don’t grow out of the scars, physically or mentally. I am grateful now for the power of that photograph of me as a nine-year-old, as I am of the journey I have taken as a person. My horror — which I barely remember — became universal. I’m proud that, in time, I have become a symbol of peace. It took me a long time to embrace that as a person. I can say, 50 years later, that I’m glad Nick captured that moment, even with all the difficulties that image created for me.”
To follow Jesus is to take up our own “crosses.” Our crosses may be traumatic pain or immeasurable loss that we have managed to survive that enable us to become the means of hope and healing for those bearing similar crosses. Or our “crosses” may be opportunities we have or abilities, skills, resources we possess that can lead to changing a difficult set of circumstances or healing a broken situation into something whole and holy. Kim Phuc Phan Thi takes up the “cross” of the photograph of that horrible day in her life and uses it as a means for obtaining help for children caught in the horrors of war. Christ calls us to transform our lives and the world we live in by embracing the vision of his cross: to courageously and soberly take on the difficult and demanding “Good Fridays” that confront us in order to bring forth the lasting transformation of the Easter promise.