The Christ Painting

During my college days, my friend, a pre-law student, approached me and asked, "Gail, can you help me with a mural of Jesus for the Christian fellowship group in Gardena?"

"I can't paint people," I replied. I wasn't an art major. "Anything I've ever painted was abstract."

"Doesn't matter," my friend said. "Just make yourself available to God, and He can use you."

I pondered my friend's words and later said to him, "I'll help with the painting."

My friend didn't have any artistic abilities, but all this changed when he became a born-again Christian.

A few days later, something uncanny happened. The flat December sunlight streamed through my bedroom windows giving the room a subtle glow. "It's too cold to get out of bed," I thought. I laid facing down on my pillow when suddenly I saw a picture of a man with his eyes shut through the floral print of my pillowcase. A bright light shone next to Him. Then it dawned on me, this man looks like Jesus. We can use this image for the painting. I was enthralled. A peace I had never known before filled my heart.

Immediately, I rose from bed, grabbed a writing tablet and pencil from my desk and loped back to my pillow. I tried to sketch the image, but the drawing didn't look anything like it whatsoever. After a few minutes, I gave up and readied myself for school. When I returned in the evening, I hurried to my pillowcase, but the image of Jesus had vanished.

Later I discovered my friend had two dreams of the Christ painting. In his first dream, a little Christ figure stood on top of the Mount of Olives toward the center. Cliffs appeared on the left side. Then a larger image of Jesus appeared in the background with His arms extended out, touching both ends of a large cross. The bright disk of the sun shone to the right. He awoke in the middle of the night, sketched what he had seen and went back to sleep. When he awoke in the morning, he was shocked to see what he had sketched. The second dream depicted the close-up details.

After we began painting, I discovered my friend painted the exact same image of Jesus I had seen through a gold rose of my pillowcase print, and I gasped. Then it dawned on me that the bright thing that I saw is either the sunrise or sunset where Jesus is standing on top of the Mount of Olives praying.

My friend pointed toward the outer borders. "Paint stained glass images with objects inside of them to represent idols."

I looked at him quizzically.

"You know, like money, power, worldly wisdom and pleasure. These things aren't wrong in and of themselves, but when we put them ahead of God, they become idols in His eyes."

We applied our brush strokes and the painting started to come alive. Some of the objects I decided to paint were a hand clutching a $100 dollar bill to represent greed, books that exalt human knowledge over God's, and a surfboard to symbolize the exclusive pursuit of pleasure.

I dipped my brush into the palette and dabbed some of the acrylic paint on the canvas. When I painted the hand clutching the money, I inadvertently painted six fingers. Oh, no! I painstakingly fixed it and heaved a big sigh.

"The hand is facing the wrong direction," my friend said. "It should point toward the Mount of Olives."

"What? Now you tell me, after all that work."

"Gail, surrender your brush to the Lord."

"Huh?" Being a new Christian, I hadn't a clue what he meant.

"Let the Lord into the painting. You're doing things on your own strength."

After a long break, I said a silent prayer. "Lord, I surrender my brush to You." Having no idea what I prayed, I aimlessly slapped the paint on top of the old hand, venting my frustrations out on it. Inexplicably, a perfect hand with five fingers appeared facing the right direction. My eyes grew wide in shock, and I stared at it slack-jawed. I knew God had intervened.

While painting the Mount of Olives, a narrow and straight road appeared before my eyes that led to the summit where Jesus stood. To the left, a wide road appeared that led to a dead-end. A verse came to my mind about the narrow and wide roads. I didn't try painting any roads. Later that day, when I came home, I thumbed through the Bible and searched for the verse about the two roads. Later I found the verses.

"Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." Matthew 7:13-14 NIV.

The painting represents the afterlife. The notes for these verses from the Life Application Bible NIV read, "Believing in Jesus is the only way to heaven, because he alone died for our sins and made us right before God."1 Narrow also represents "earnestly desiring to know Jesus and diligently striving to follow Him whatever the cost."2 I blinked hard.

The broad road represents choosing a way other than God's plan. "Jesus exposed those people who sounded religious but had no personal relationship with him. On 'that day' (the day of judgment), only our relationship with Christ--our acceptance of him as Savior and our obedience to him--will matter."3

After two months of long evenings and weekends, we completed the painting. Three USC art professors rated the painting as genius. Despite these accolades, my friend very humbly said, "God used our hands and all the credit goes to Him."