Last week I saw someone on the TV and they reminded me of a painting. I think it is a Flemish or possibly a Dutch painting. I can just close my eyes and see the picture, but I cannot locate it. I have tried every combination of search words and image searches to find artwork, but I keep coming up empty. The face is haunting me and I just can’t shake it. It is very frustrating when my mind will only give me a few of the details. I just know I am going to stumble on the picture eventually. I keep going back to look at the face I saw on TV and each time the back of my mind tickles.
One of my attempts to locate the art took me to Google Arts and Culture. It’s an app. I downloaded it. You take a selfie and then it makes suggestions of who you look like. It says I have a 56% chance of being Johann Sebastian Bach. That seems cool to me. He is famous and contributed some great art to the world.
I retook my picture over and over again. I opened my eyes, I smiled big, I frowned. It generated other matches. Most of the closest matches were Dutch and the portraits were in the Rijksmuseum. I think that the search engine might run to that museum first therefore everyone looks like someone from Holland. After working at it for a while the closest match I got was 62% for Hermanus Boerhaave.
I looked him up. Wow he did some good in the world. His wiki article says, “Dutch botanist, chemist, Christian humanist, and physician of European fame. He is regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital and is sometimes referred to as "the father of physiology," …introduced the quantitative approach into medicine, …best known for demonstrating the relation of symptoms to lesions …first physician to put thermometer measurements to clinical practice… often hailed as the "Dutch Hippocrates". Not too shabby.
Not one of the searches compared me to a portrait of Jesus. We don’t really know what Jesus looked like, some ancient sources indicate that he was neither good looking nor tall. As it says in Isaiah, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”(53:2). We do know what his life looked like. It was filled with love and truth and grace. I hope to look more like Jesus than I do.