faith and photography: my scream

I have spent the last hour contemplating my faith and my photography: how they work together, how they work apart, and how to use a gift from God.

I feel weird calling my photography a "gift from God", I know I have a skill and an eye but it's hard to think of myself as a "photographer."  Right now I'm trying to cram for a Studies in Literature exam on the book My Name is Asher Lev and I am far from finishing it.  Basically Asher Lev is an observer of a very strict sect of Judaism, and he is also an artist (drawings/paintings).  Being an artist is not what a good little Jewish boy should be doing, so he is struggling.  There is a quote from a book Asher reads that says:

"...every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race.  Every man who has shown the world they way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a "universal" without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere."

I'm not sure why, but this has stayed with me and prevented me from really focusing on my studying.  Somehow it got me thinking about how I can use my photography.  I am a Political Science: Pre-Law major, not an Art major, but I have this 'gift' of photography that I love and want to use.  In class the other day we were talking about the great people of our time, our/humanity's heros (mine were Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, MLK, Eisenhower, Gandhi...) and my professor said something like "greatness comes from a scream that needs to come out.  Most of us don't have a scream, most of us are not fundamentally going to change history like these people did" (referring to the great people of our time).

I have a scream.  I have a scream that I want to shout to the world in any way I can, maybe through politics or maybe through photography... or maybe through both.  The trouble is, I don't know how to articulate my scream.  I can feel it in my bones and in my soul, something important, something profound.  I just can't put it into words.  Maybe that's why I love photography so much, because it doesn't involve words but rather emotion, feelings, and interpretation.  Books have been written on single images.  Could photography be my tool for letting out my scream?  The only words I can educe for my scream is "justice" (hence my decision to be Pre-Law) and "humanity".  I want to change the world, I want to further the Kingdom of God, but do I want to be 'great'?  Ronald Reagan wisely said "there is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." I have tried to live by this quote since I heard it many years ago.  Maybe I am meant to change the world, but I am not supposed to be a "great".

It's unclear to me where to go from here, but I know the ending of My Name is Asher Lev and I know where he ends up.