A Picture Made By Love

Many, many years ago a great Cathedral was being built along the Rhine River. While they sang the opening song, I thought of that old Cathedral in Europe that took so many years to build. One day as the laborers were working there a poor old beggar come along who had seen better days. As he passed he paused a moment to look at that glorious building climbing heavenward like a built prayer. Like a prayer built in stone. He asked if he could help build it. The artisan said, No, it takes a man who’s a skilled craftsman. Only journeyman can work here, men who know stone and art and colored glass and timber. Only builders and artist’s who have worked a lifetime in this trade can work here. There no place here for a beggar like you. But he pleaded and he pleaded and he hung around and he made himself useful until finally the master in charge of the great building said, “Alright, if he wants to work, fix a scaffold for him way up there in that dark corner in that arch out of site. If he wants to paint or do something there let him do it.”

They rigged in a few boards and the old man laboriously climbed up there every morning and worked all day coming down only at night. He kept that up all day, in cold or heat day after day for several years. He carried little bits of stone, colored glass up to his scaffold and worked in the shadows and people paid little attention to him.

One day he was found dead at his post. When the workers were asked to remove the scaffold, they discovered what he had bee doing up there in that dark corner. He had been making something they would never forget. With those bits of stone and glass he had created among the shadows a likeness of a face, a face so wonderful, a face so majestic. This was a picture that only could’ve made by love. This was the face of Jesus.

We’re told that before the First World War, tourists came from all over the world to look at on a certain day of the year, just one day a year. Just one day when the sunlight was edging northward and finally peaked in through one particular window and illuminated that face.

For just one day people came from all corners of the earth to look at it, a picture of love.

So wherever you work it maybe in some dark corner of God’s great harvest field. You can paint there on somebody’s heart a picture of Jesus. You can work in solitude. It may seem to you that you are in darkness. But in the cold, in the heat, in old age or in sickness, work that springs forth from a heart of love to Jesus is never lost. And death never ends any work that God called men to do.