Amid the rubble...

Tim Woodcock writes… This is a very striking photo that encountered recently. I received it embedded in an email from an organization called Embrace the Middle East. While its meaning might seem plain, there was no caption, so I put it aside for a few days, assuming that it was a tragic candid photo of a church nativity scene, somewhere in the Palestine/Israel area, in which the church had been badly damaged. But there is more to the story than that...

Several days later, it occurred to me that with the wonders of technology, I could do a “reverse image search” online to find out what exactly the photo was portraying. Many companies offer this feature; Google’s search worked best for me.

It’s an image from Bethlehem that began to be circulated about 10 days ago. It does not show a recently bombed church at all but is an artistically created creche in the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. To reflect the warzone around them, the church create the seasonal decoration out of debris from nearby streets, placing it where the church would typically locate a Christmas tree.

In the absolute center of the image above, there is a toy baby (not a Jesus figure per se), representing a child trapped under the rubble. The toy baby wrapped is in the traditional Palestinian fabric known as keffiyeh and nearby there are also broken branches, candles, and icons.

Other photos of the same scene make the full context much clearer, including the sapling of an olive tree, a sign of hope, which was not visible in the tightly cropped image that I first saw.