My Father's Archives #6

While going through my father's archives trying to choose a picture for my weekly blip, I was reminded of a very personal experience linked to these photographs.
Up until my early twenties, my faith had been the faith of my father, identical in its doctrines and its expression. Up until then I had lived in a largely protected Christian environment. But when I moved to Switzerland, I met people who not only didn't share my faith, but also didn't understand the country I was coming from. When I told them how I had been brought up, I remember one colleague commenting: "You sound like you were born in the colonial period." I realized that I was different and that the reason for all that separated me from my new friends was faith. It was faith that had led my parents to Brazil, it was faith that had given me a life that no-one seemed to understand anymore. Then I asked myself: What do I really believe? 
The answer was: I didn't know. My faith was not mine, it was my father's.
Thus began a long and painful search for the things that really mattered to me. There were times when I couldn't look at the photographs my father had taken during his life as a missionary because they represented everything I blamed for all that I now rejected.
But it was also my father's archive that gave me a clue to how to approach faith in a new way. There were moments when I could see the love the man behind the camera felt for the people in front of it. Love became the key and foundation for the personal faith I would develop in the following years.
Evidently, this journey is ongoing and envolves so much more than what I have described above in just a few words. But the essence can be summed up as follows:
The "faith of our fathers" was the seed. And I was the plant the seed had to die for.


(There is another lesson I learned from these photographs: My life is not written in stone. Today's blip shows a group of people on their way to church on a Sunday morning. A couple of years ago, I would have shaken my head at the absurdity of these men wearing suits despite an almost unbearable heat. Today I see friends.

If you change your perspective, a photograph can help you rewrite your past and open your eyes for the privilege of being different.)