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Carve your life by looking at the real thing-Jesus. He's your model.

by Ruth Senter

Visiting an artist's studio recently taught me something

It looks like any ordinary small barn.

Unpretentious. Setting there like a part of the wooded landscape. Natural and at home with itself.

We walk through the door, and eventually find the inner sanctum—the place of creation.

The studio is full of light and wings. There are feathered wing spans everywhere. Hanging from the rafters. From nails on the walls. Pinned up to cork board, propped up on the artist's table. Real wings. Intricate feathered connections that have come from live birds.

Through the window, we see a large cage. A Red-tailed Hawk eyes us suspiciously as he swings on his perch. In the middle of the room sits a large, half completed wooden carving. A covey of quail are rousing from the cornfield as a Red-tailed Hawk swoops down for the take.

The hawk in the cage is real. The one on the wooden pedestal is not. I have to look hard to tell the difference.

"How do you ever get these birds to look so real?" I ask the artist.

"I keep looking at the real thing," he says simply, with a nod toward the bird in the cage.

"The way you have to do with Jesus," he adds. "You've got to carve your life by looking at the real thing—Jesus. He's your model." He picks up a thin blade and begins to bring more feathers from the wood. We stand and watch in amazement.

At times I am tempted to try being an artist without a model. I have in mind what will work; why consult my Bible? Why ask, "What would Jesus do?" It is then that the danger of going off course is the greatest—ending up, not looking like Jesus at all.

My artist friend understood the danger.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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