Picture Perfect

This post was a guest blog I wrote for Karma for Life! on Cover Reveal Day, but I also wanted to share with you what I see and feel in the cover of Little Girl Mended.

It’s been said a picture’s worth a thousand words. As a writer, words are important to me…but there’s just something about a picture. Words can evoke emotion because they create a picture in the mind…and yet there’s just something about a physical picture. In the same way music oftentimes speaks to the heart more deeply and more fully than mere words are able, so it sometimes is with pictures.

Looking at my life through the pictures in our family photo albums can transport me back to the feelings in the moment those photos were taken. I feel again the excitement of that first kiss as husband and wife. There’s the one where I’m holding my firstborn for the first time, or the one where my youngest is receiving an award in kindergarten as he looks proudly at the camera. There are graduations and weddings, holidays and vacations—years of memories and feelings captured in photographs.

After a lifetime of photos, I’m familiar with the emotions they evoke. But recently, a picture took me by surprise. As we developed the cover for Little Girl Mended, from the beginning I had an idea of what the cover should be. Working through concepts and mockups with my creative team over a couple of months, we decided on a cover I felt good about, but I’d only seen it in mockup. With launch only a few weeks away, the team has just finalized the cover. I waited anxiously for our designer to send the finished product to me.

And then I saw it. I stopped breathing for just a second or two. This story that I’d spent seven years writing and a lifetime living and grieving over and healing from was captured in this cover—this picture. It took my breath away, and then it released in me a torrent of emotion I didn’t see coming. Tears flowed; you know, the ugly kind with sobbing, hiccupping, and nose flowing freely. What was all this emotion? Where had it come from?

I didn’t try to stop it but let it flow through me—all those many feelings. In that one picture, I saw the essence of my story, of my life. A little girl no longer innocent, grasping forlornly onto the remnants of her lost childhood. But that’s not where her story ends. The rest of the story is captured in the title splayed boldly across that haunted child, Little Girl Mended. Just as promised in Psalm 103:5–6, “He fills my life with good things. My youth is renewed like the eagle’s! The Lord gives righteousness and justice to all who are treated unfairly.” That’s the ultimate truth about this little girl. God is so very good! This cover captures so much about my story so beautifully—from struggle…to hope…to healing.