{"id":47492,"date":"2005-01-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/photographers-indifference-drove-him-to-suicide\/"},"modified":"2005-01-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-24T00:00:00","slug":"photographers-indifference-drove-him-to-suicide","status":"publish","type":"sermon-illustrations","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/photographers-indifference-drove-him-to-suicide\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer&#8217;s Indifference Drove Him to Suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1994, South African photojournalist Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. The photograph that brought him fame depicted an emaciated Sudanese child crawling toward a feeding center&mdash;under the hard stare of a nearby vulture.<\/p>\n\n<p>The image, which so powerfully captured the horror of famine-stricken Sudan in the early 1990s, drew international attention to both Sudan&#39;s suffering and to Kevin Carter&#39;s career. But with Carter&#39;s acclaim came the questions. People wanted to know&mdash;what had happened to the child? After snapping his camera, what had Carter done to help the dying child?<\/p>\n\n<p>Painfully, Cater admitted that after spending about 20 minutes framing the shot, he had simply walked away. Within two months of receiving journalism&#39;s most coveted award, the 33-year-old photojournalist took his own life.<\/p>\n\n<p>Kevin Carter had been raised in a devoutly religious home, but he had long since left his upbringing behind. Now he&#39;d seen too much of the world&#39;s suffering, and he could no long cope. He parked his pickup truck near where he had played as a child, attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe, and breathed in the fumes. &quot;I&#39;m really, really sorry,&quot; he said in a note left on the seat beside him. &quot;The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist&#8230;.&quot;<\/p>\n\n<p>Dr. Warren Cooper, a Christian, works as a surgeon with Samaritan&#39;s Purse in southern Sudan. The suffering Warren has seen among his patients is indescribable. And yet, after five years in a hospital that has been called &quot;a living history museum of pathology,&quot; he has no plans to leave.<\/p>\n\n<p>How does Dr. Cooper cope?&#8230; For Warren, the field of medicine allows him to live out his Christian faith&mdash;not just in word, but in deed. &quot;I think it&#39;d be very hard to continue doing this if your didn&#39;t have a sense of ultimate meaning to what you were doing,&quot; he says.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tax_ctp_audience":[],"tax_ctp_authors":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[165],"tax_ctp_format":[171],"tax_ctp_illustration_types":[411],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[],"tax_publications":[140],"tax_ctp_tags":[3548,3648,4118,4236,4255,4470,4533,4669,4801,4909,4941,4944,4953,4963,4978,5105,5178],"tax_ctp_topics":[378,382,388,396],"class_list":["post-47492","sermon-illustrations","type-sermon-illustrations","status-publish","hentry","tax_publications-ct-pastors","tax_ctp_tags-caring","tax_ctp_tags-compassion","tax_ctp_tags-hardness-of-heart","tax_ctp_tags-indifference","tax_ctp_tags-insensitivity","tax_ctp_tags-ministry","tax_ctp_tags-negligence","tax_ctp_tags-poverty","tax_ctp_tags-remorse","tax_ctp_tags-self-centeredness","tax_ctp_tags-sensitivity","tax_ctp_tags-september-11-2001","tax_ctp_tags-service","tax_ctp_tags-shame","tax_ctp_tags-sin-nature","tax_ctp_tags-suicide","tax_ctp_tags-tragedy"],"acf":{"scripture_references":[{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null}]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Photographer&#039;s Indifference Drove Him to Suicide - CT Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/photographers-indifference-drove-him-to-suicide\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Photographer&#039;s Indifference Drove Him to Suicide - CT Pastors\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In 1994, South African photojournalist Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. The photograph that brought him fame depicted an emaciated Sudanese child crawling toward a feeding center&mdash;under the hard stare of a nearby vulture. 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