Hello again friends. It seems that life has interrupted my writing again.
I would like to share a true story from my life. This is an exerpt from a rough draft from my memoir. It is the introduction to my work on keeping promises. I hope you like it.
Years ago I was commissioned by a man to paint a portrait of Christ. It is an interesting story really, I was approached after having done some mural work for a local club, and after handing me a check for several hundred dollars, he informed me of his wishes.
“God has moved me to commission this work,” he told me. “I’ve seen what you can do, and I’m confident that it is you that God has in mind.”
I thanked him for his confidence, and proceeded to ask him the usual questions:
How big?
What medium?
What timeline was I looking at?
His answer was very strange at the time.
“Its gotta be big,” he told me. “Its gotta be big and in color. I know you like to do those black and white dot things, but this is in color.”
I nodded.
“When do you want it by?” I asked.
“Well, God has told me that I am going to die in eleven years.”
Inwardly I raised an eyebrow and let out an “Oooooooh-kay.” I heard the sounds of cuckoo birds somewhere off in the distance, but I shrugged it off and let him continue.
“I have eleven years,” He repeated. “I’m not going to bother you about it. God has told me to trust you. As long as I get it before then, I have no time requirements for you.”
I snickered to myself as I shook his hand... this guy is some piece of work.
My daughter was born shortly thereafter. Soon after that I had moved to a town about an hour away to go to college. Following that I was married. Somewhere in that time, my daughter had developed her neurological difficulties, and we moved again to be closer to the medical health professionals of the metropolitan area of Grand Rapids. I graduated college; I got my first professional job. My wife and I had five more children. In short. Life happened.
In the back of my mind I always had that promise. From time to time I toyed with the idea of starting the painting whose commission I had long since spent. I never got around to it, plain and simple. It wasn’t a big priority. There had been no rush. I have to admit that from time to time, I was sure he had written it off. I was just some asshole that screwed him. Again, I have to admit that at times, the thought crossed my mind.
One day, about six or eight weeks ago I was driving down a busy urban street when an old red pickup truck drove by. There was an old man and woman seated in the cab, and I could distinctly make their features out as they passed me by, going in the direction from whence I had just come. There was a moment of eye contact between the driver, and myself and to my surprise I saw the man whose picture I had yet to paint. Finally, with what I was certain to be a sign from on high, I began work on the face of Jesus Christ.
Once the piece was completed to my satisfaction, I put the canvas up—high out of the reach of my small children, and debated on how I was going to get this picture to its rightful owner. We are not a wealthy family by any means, and any extra cash usually goes into the bellies of our children, so the idea of having to drive two hours to deliver this picture was out of the budget, and out of the picture for the foreseeable future.
It became a bit of a joke with me. “Hello, Jesus!” I would say upon passing the portrait. “How's’ it hangin?” What more appropriate thing to say to a painting? In truth, I began to enjoy having his smiling face around. But as time went on, it became a problem of procrastination again. The image was done, but it needed to get to whom it belonged.
One of my wife’s clients had paid her in cash. So there was sixty dollars that the family had planned on using to go north to visit my parents. The Saturday prior to our visit, my youngest son Max, became ill. I called my mother and told her we wouldn’t be coming after all, and that we would have to wait a week. The tank had already been filled.
My mom said that she and my dad would come and visit us, and thus, the next conversation I had with Jesus was a little different.
“Hey, Jesus! How’s it hangin?” I began.
“When are you going to take me to where I belong?’
“Come on, man. You know I don’t have the money to take you there, or else I would have done it already.”
“My son, that’s a bunch of garbage and you know it. I provided you with money to go and visit your parents. Instead, they came to see you. You still have all that gas. Use it to take me home.”
Damn. Jesus was right.
Today was that day. For weeks now, I had been wondering what the reaction would be when I showed up after all this time, Christ in hand. I pulled up to the building I had painted so many years ago, and walked inside. There was the smell of cigarette smoke and coffee that had always been there. There had been some painting and other decorating, but otherwise it was still the same. I waited until the men that were in the lobby had noticed me, and I asked if the gentleman I was looking for still hung out around there. And I received odd looks and silence for my query.
“He passed away this past fall.” A young man with a full head of hair and intellectual looking glasses told me. I felt my heart sink.
It occurred to me at that moment that it had been nearly eleven years since I was first commissioned to do this portrait.
It also occurred to me that I have gone through life with this “it can wait” or “I’ll do it tomorrow” attitude. Now I am reminded of all the fact that there are just some things you cant take back. Most things in life I would say, you are able to get “do-overs.” You don’t like your career you can go back to school and start again. If you don’t like your Dodge Charger, you can trade it in on a Ford Mustang. Even in the more important areas of our lives, we choose who we will marry—and sometimes when things don’t work out, we can do that over as well. We change our majors, we relocate, we make plans and then cancel them If we get into an argument, we can always apologize. If we hurt a loved one, we can always try to make it up to them. . It all becomes part of our fickle culture, our disposable nation. Until one day we make plans to do something with someone, and they are gone.
I never got that picture to its rightful owner before he passed away. In my mind the only right thing to do was to find his closest surviving relative and give the picture to them. A few questions and a dozen gestures towards the east later, I found myself at a small auto repair business a few miles away. I spied a man coming out of the small building nearby and introduced myself. There was no mistaking this as the son of the man who had commissioned me. For a moment, I had the feeling that I was staring at the man I had come to see—only twenty years younger. I told him I had known his father, and that I had something for him but that I had heard he had passed away. We talked for a little while, and I presented the picture to his son. In the end, I guess it was a gift from a father to his son. I was merely the vessel. It had been bought and paid for.
It still didn’t settle within me the realization that I had left a promise unfulfilled. It wasn’t this portrait of Christ that it was about however. It was about another promise, one I made to a little girl on a warm summer day.
