My friend Chuck Dean is an author of several books dealing with PTSD.  Chuck wrote one night in something called "streming" and shared it with me.  He gave me permission to share it.  Here it is.

 

"The Real Thing. 

 The magazine was slick. The photograph stunning.

It all changed, however, when I lifted my ink-stained thumb off the glossy page. What was once so life-like had now shown its true colors. The smudge from mixing my perspiration with printer’s ink left a swirly fingerprint spot on the edge of the page and a thought prevailed.

The scene was not real—it was only an image of the real thing. I had been so engrossed in its beauty that no thought was given to what I was seeing. To me the Grand Canyon ceased to exist when the smeared sky just above the canyon wall told the truth. My fingerprint found the fault and I suddenly realized I had never seen this natural wonder in our great land…I had only seen a rendition of it all along.

We live in a culture that constantly bombards us with images. From television to print we have been shown people, places, plants, planets, and plenty of other points of interest at least a gazillion times. Sadly spectacular things around the world, whether created by the myopic mind of man or chiseled by the awesome hand of God, have all become ordinary because of our saturation of images and the mere likenesses of the real thing.

Don’t be fooled. Unless you have actually seen the dawn lift the mist off the Mississippi, the sun set on the Sahara, and the night fall on New Dehli, you just have not seen them at all.

I cannot even begin to imagine how many artists’ renditions I have seen of Jesus. Some paint him as gentle and sweet with long flowing beautiful hair…others portray him as gaunt and gnarly like a blue-collar carpenter would have looked back then. But do any of them convince me of what he really looks like? Hardly.

In closing; I am reminded of the men who knocked on a door so many years ago, and asked, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”  They did not settle for images or hearsay…they went looking to find the real thing. May we always be seekers of the real thing.

C. Dean, 2006"

I cannot think of how often I visit the sites and I'm even caught in the debate about the Lord Jesus.  I apologize if I have offeded,but I am passionate for Him because He has done so much for me.  You see Dear Brothers, it's irrelavent how, why, what or even if one chooses to believe the truth of the Gospels (the Bible), it still remains, the truth.  It is also irrelavent whether we as men (mankind) choose to believe or to disbelieve in God, His truth will win out.

As Chuck is saying in his essay, until you have your own encounter with the risen Christ, no one can describe Him to you.  And all my or anyone elses descriptions of their encounters are mere pictures. Only an artist's rendition. 

Be blessed,

Frank