The Value of a Picture

 The Value of a Picture 

By Bobby Neal Winters

On a Saturday in early September, in the entrance to Timmons Chapel on the campus of Pittsburg State University, I had a vision.  It was a flash of movie dialog going through my head:

“You come to me on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and you ask of me a favor.’

It was my wife asking me to put together a tripod that was to hold a poster that contained pictures of the bride and groom as babies with baby food smeared across their faces.  

On one hand, it was a worthy thing, well within my skillset, all the parts were there, no tools needed, no glue necessary.

On the other hand, it was less than an hour to the wedding; I was dressed in a coat and tie; and I didn’t have a work bench.  All I had were the “directions.”

(In my wife’s defense, she hadn’t known that the tripod required actual assembly or we would’ve assembled it ahead of time.)

Let me say this: The directions weren’t useless; they were worse than useless. They were written on a tiny piece of thin paper, and consisted of tiny pictures with tiny labels. Connect part G to part H, when you can’t tell what parts G and H are from the instructions.  This sort of thing continued until the last, and perhaps, only useful line of the directions:  Look at the picture on the box and put it together.

So, after 15 minutes of fumbling, I looked at the picture on the box and put it together, with my wife and two of my daughters (not the bride who was otherwise engaged) helping.

A picture is worth a thousand words just as they say.

Description of physical objects is difficult.  When I was doing mathematical research in the topology of 3-manifolds, I sweated blood in describing the pictures I saw in my head.  Was I right in my descriptions?  The first time anyone reads one of my papers, we might know.

But I am not the first person to have had this difficulty, far from it.  This is a problem that goes back literally thousands of years. To know this is true, all you need to do is read Chapter 26 of the Book of Exodus where the construction of the Tabernacle (the tent the Children of Israel used to worship) is described.  If you have a Bible near to hand, I would encourage you to take it in hand, open to that chapter, and read a while.

It reminds me of an exchange from “Paint Your Wagon”:

“You should read the Bible, Mr. Rumson.”

“I have read the Bible, Mrs. Fenty.”

“Didn’t it discourage you about drinking?”

“No, but it sure killed my appetite for readin’!”

My point isn’t to discourage you from reading the Bible but to emphasize how difficult it is to describe reality without pictures.  Even using a lot of words and taking admirable care in description, describing the Tabernacle was hard.  

Can  you make one from reading it?

I am sure you can, maybe several of them that look quite different from each other.  Drawing a picture of the Tabernacle would’ve been helpful with a list of parts and tools needed, but that idea hadn’t come yet apparently.

But things like tents aren’t the only challenge.  A lawyer came to Jesus asking him how he might inherit eternal life.  A discussion ensued in which it was suggested the lawyer should love his neighbor as himself.

This sounds like a simple rule, but the lawyer asked for clarification.

Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan.

A story isn’t literally a picture, but it serves a similar purpose.  It builds a picture in our minds, a picture we can relate the words, the concepts to.

The poster I referred to at the beginning--the one on the tripod--had pictures of the bride and groom with baby food on their faces.  It reminded us that these two responsible, grown-up people were once babies in our arms. To some degree, they are still babies in our hearts, but as parents we need to now let that go.  While that connection can never completely be overcome, we have to know that they must be more important to each other than we, the parents, are to them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.