Once you know who he’s there with, doesn’t it strike you as a little unusual? She’s less than two years younger, and siblings that close in age (at that stage in life) are typically not close at all.
That she trusted him and wanted him to perform her baptism is peculiar, in all the good ways.
The Stories Pictures Tell
Tie it all the pictures together, and you’ve got a panorama. You get a deeper view of your subject, and one that sinks in deeper because it involves conclusions the viewers arrive at on their own.
Maybe you didn’t arrive at the same conclusions I did. Maybe you saw something different, and that’s okay, because what you saw is the marriage of an objective truth and your subjective interpretation and it will resonate with you long before any mere description I write about Wesley.
When you’re attempting to persuade, don’t discount the value of letting people see the truth for themselves.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one impressed by the story behind these pictures. I was one of several hundred people who said goodbye to Wesley yesterday. Seventeen is much too young to go, particularly for a kid who had so much going for him.
I could tell you how much… but you saw it for yourself.
First I want to say what an interesting story and wonderful tribute to Wesley, a very sad situation, but your pictures told the story well.
Secondly, today is an interesting day for you to post this. Last year was my first and only time to teach US history so on September 11, I put one picture from that day on my board and asked my students to tell me, through writing, what was happening in the picture. I teach 6th grade, most of my students last year were toddlers on 9/11 and their elementary teachers had “protected” them from the importance of that day. One class I just showed a picture of the towers and an airplane and asked them to tell me what would happen on this morning. They wrote beautiful stories of spring days and sunshine. Only a few noticed the airplane and realized the fate. Others had pictures of people in the streets with ash falling over them and they wrote about bombs or even volcanoes.
I then showed the classes the clips from the Today show that morning and as they watched the entire tragedy unfold they kept going back to the pictures they had first written about. “So the planes flew into the buildings?” or “those people with ash on them were there?” Their questions came from those pictures. They somehow related to the pictures. They wanted to know more about what happened, but mostly what happened to what they first saw and had already drawn conclusions about.
I use pictures every single day in my classroom. I do not think I could teach a lesson without having pictures to back up my teaching or storytelling. Pictures add a depth to our world that we would miss without. Thanks for shedding light on that!
I finally understood this post when I saw the pagination… Ike. Call me slow to the punch. Beautiful post, Ike!! So very sad, too.
Bless his poor family. What a wonderful way to make your points and memorialize Wes. He seems like an outstanding, faithful kid.
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leigh
WOW! I saw some of the same qualities about him as you mentioned, but then the ‘punch line’ of his passing away really did punch me in the stomach.
Powerful stuff, Ike. Nice work and tastefully done around a difficult subject.