Steve Lundeberg

Baseball isn’t exactly a religion to me — the latter, after all, is about the meaning of life, whereas the former is about well-struck line drives and crisply turned double plays — but the game I’ve played my whole life does permeate my soul in a sort of spiritual way.

That’s why it doesn’t bother me — and I’m hoping it doesn’t bother Jesus either — that today’s topic combines history’s most famous carpenter with another admired man who for whom lumber played a key role: Stan Musial.

What does one have to do with the other? Depends on how you look at things, I guess. I’ll try to explain.

There’s this church in Salem that I’ve driven past probably a couple hundred times, most of them while en route to one of my old-guy baseball games (we mainly play in the Salem area).

On the side of this church is something that resembles the splotches on a Holstein cow but, I was told long ago, actually, if you look at it just right, depicts the face of Jesus.

Like I said, I’d gone past this building many, many times, each time trying to see Jesus’ image there, without success. And my son Bob was in the exact same boat.

Until Christmas Day. As we drove to our dinner engagement in Keizer,  he finally saw Him. A Christmas miracle of sorts, but one that eluded me, again.

The next day, I found myself in Silverton, at the home of my longtime baseball teammate, Trent. I had a gift for him — a New York Black Yankees dugout jacket I’d found, basically brand-new, at Goodwill — and he had one for me too: A color, 8×10, autographed picture of Stan “The Man” Musial — widely renowned as one of the best human beings in the history of major league baseball — that had been among Trent’s own possessions.

“When I read your blog about Stan Musial awhile ago and then found the photo,” he said, ” I knew you had to have it.”

Here it is:

So on Sunday, the third and final day of a rare three-day Christmas weekend, I found myself heading north again, this time to my brother Duane’s house in Portland. My wife Roberta was driving — she’d seen Jesus long ago — and Bob was in the back seat.

As we approached the church once again, I had a sudden thought. “Pull over,” I said. “I want to take a really good look at this, and if I still can’t see it, I want to take a picture so I can look at it some more later.”

I walked toward the building, staring at it, but I just couldn’t see what I was supposed to see, not really anyway, even after they’d explained to me exactly how I was supposed to be perceiving the design.

Somewhat disappointed, I squeezed off a photo. Then, looking at the photo while walking back to the car, Jesus suddenly appeared. I realize that having my eyes and mind finally unravel this image on the wall isn’t theologically significant, but after all those years of failure, it was highly satisfying nonetheless.

Here He is. Can you see Him?

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