The People in the Mural

Every Person Has a Story


Girl from Mindanao.


Girl from Thailand.


Girl from Peru.

The Journey is as Interesting as the Destination

As we've continued work on the Staunton Alliance Church Mural [click to read] the sketches have become part of the story too. Laney and I research each culture and create the characters with some knowledge of their background. This is not your Mother's nursery mural. Our goal is that our kids will actually be able to reach out and touch people from around the globe and learn something about their respective cultures.

The mural is an attempt to portray the New Earth described in Isaiah 60 and Revelation 21. Here we see the peoples of the entire world coming to the throne of G-d. The beauty of each person's culture and the representation of Imagio Dei in each person is an important part of the story. Part of this beautiful redemptive story for us has been to find real pictures of children in these places today... often in hard and impoverished places, and place them in their beautiful traditional costumes as princes and princessess of this renewed world.

Most of the time it is a pretty enjoyable task, but there are times when the state of children in the present world slaps us in the face. When my fellow artist in this project was researching Burma, for example, she was confronted with images of dead childrens' bodies when she searched the term 'Burmese children.' This type of reality has strengthened our resolve to show a redemptive reality on the walls of our church building. Please pray that we will be able to do just that.

When we began this project, my colleague prayed "Lord, work through our hands." Indeed that is a prayer I want to carry into my other tasks and endeavors as well.