America and a Messianic Jew

First off, it is the 4th of July and I desperately covet your hamburgers and potato salads. Actually, I don’t covet them since I have become a vegan but I still wish you a happy 4th of July and shall give you one of my favorite stories of the holiday.

Some time ago some of my good friends and I were celebrating the aforementioned holiday. We were traveling towards Downtown Brentwood for some exciting firework action. It was a glorious night, not too warm, a nice breeze comforting us, full of patriotic bliss. A night such as this warrants a strict rolling-down-of-the-windows policy which we were all happy to obey.

As we pull up to a stop-light, my good friend Judson makes eye-contact with a man in an adjacent car. It was the kind of eye contact that demanded verbal engagement. We were all drawn to it. This moment was one that would be special. Call it a 6th sense if you must, but we all knew we were about to have a moment.

After little thought, Judson utters one word, proudly and boldly, to this stranger:

“America.”

Without missing a beat, the man shook his head in agreement, declaring the following:

“You’d better believe it.”

And we did, because that word stood for something. I could throw out the buzzwords but you already know them. Love it or hate it, America is a great place to live. Is it perfect?
Of course it isn’t. It is something for which it is worth being grateful.

Secondly, I feel I am long overdue in giving you an update on things here. Some of it I will be able to talk more about in the next few weeks and days and I ask you to be patient as I wait for the proper time. Some of it I can tell you about, but won’t because I’m a jerk.

I’m joking, if only a little. The homes in Gratieşti, which will serve as the transitional homes for boys and girls from the orphanage into independent life, are slowly moving along. There is some work being done on the girl’s home but the work that can be done is very minimal. Documents and paperwork is still the primary thing being done. I have no idea how long, exactly, this will take. It could be a few weeks or more. But they are moving along well and we seem to have a good company involved in the projects.

We have had a little delay in the furniture we have been building. I’ll be a little wordier on that later in the week. Right now it is just sitting, as am I. I’ve already read two and a half books this week (Into the Air by Jon Krakauer [which I absolutely was enthralled by], How to be Good by Nick Hornby [not as good as some of his other books but an enjoyable read] and Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton [I really like his writings on spiritual matters]. I’ve also been spending some time in the Old Testament (mainly Genesis), a place I wish I spent more time in. Hopefully we’ll get some news on the room this week. It has been nice to catch up on some reading.

Speaking of the Old Testament, I had the chance to spend some time with a Messianic Jew named Ghenadie who is an extremely talented painter from Moldova. Some friends of mine bumped into him at the national history museum and they began speaking.

It turns out that he is the president of an organization that works for spiritual renewal through the arts with the children of Moldova from a Christian perspective. They are active with the orphan population here in Chisinau. He was an amazing man and artist. For those of you who have been to Internat 2 in Chisinau and have seen the graffiti murals on the walls, you have seen one of the things his organization has done. He was an amazing man and artist.

We had the good fortune of going to his home to have a private showing of his work. As he led us into his home and studio, I was confronted with a painting of Jesus on trial in the synagogue that was about 8 feet long and 5 feet high. It was absolutely breathtaking due to its great spiritual depth and its style.

This painting was deeply personal. It had a wonderful Jewish perspective of a beautiful yet sometimes painful Christian event. He placed himself in this painting but put his back facing you, the painting’s audience, thus placing you in the theme. There was a visible dichotomy between light and darkness, heaven and hell, good and evil. It was theological and profoundly spiritual, which is hard in any form of expression to get across. I could try to describe it, but I would fail time and time again. A thousand words wouldn’t do it justice. I hope it will suffice to say that it is truly breathtaking.

He and his wife then proceeded to show us some of his other works. They were all amazing. There was one called “John” which I would love to take home. I can’t afford it though. That was what else struck me about this man. He had ideals. When asked how much he would sell his paintings for, he gave us high prices saying he knows they are high but doesn’t want to sell them because they are evangelical tools for him, especially the painting I spoke about earlier. They are ways he speaks of his “rebirth,” the only way he ever spoke about his salvation through Jesus Christ.

He doesn’t want to sell his paintings to someone who would just hang them on a wall to look pretty somewhere. They have stories to tell, deep meanings and dialogues to start about Christ. They are the way he engages a specific culture with the Gospel. How do you put a price on that?

Meeting Ghenadie was a breath of fresh air. I love seeing people who have blatantly been transformed and reborn by and in the Gospel and who express that occurrence in deeply beautiful ways. I hope to be one of those people.