Look at that Face.

I spell Face here with a capitol “F” because the artist wanted to draw the Face of Jesus Christ.

The artist is a then six year old Lucy Schaeffer who is the great granddaughter of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. If you don’t know who Francis and Edith Schaeffer are then just Google their names on the internet because I don’t know how to insert hyperlinks in this text, although I’m sure that there’s a way. But I don’t know how yet to do it.

“Google,” that’s a funny verb formed from a noun for a thing that never had existed before the third millennium since the time when the real Jesus Christ walked our Earth with us. Was there a real Jesus Christ who walked our Earth with us? Lucy Schaeffer thinks so. Why? Because she has “faith like a child.” That’s what the real Jesus Christ said we must have if we ever want to enter His “Kingdom of Heaven.”

If I remember correctly . . . and there’s only a 50/50 chance that I do . . . Lucy is named after the little girl heroine “Lucy” in “The Chronicles of Narnia,” written by C.S. Lewis. And this real Lucy drew her inspiration for the Face of Jesus Christ from her beloved icons that she sees every Sunday in the Greek Orthodox church which she attends with her extended family of Frank and Genie Schaeffer and maybe her mother and father, John Schaeffer, who wrote a book with his father, Frank Schaeffer, that was entitled, “Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story About Love And The United States Marine Corps.”

Frank’s and Genie’s son John joined the United States Marine Corps right out of high school right after radical Islamists waged violent jihad against the United States of America in 2001 when they flew jet airplanes into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City. John served tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan at the very beginning of the longest war in American history that ended last year with our country’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, that ancient graveyard of empires.

I know John Schaeffer even less than I know his father Frank Schaeffer, but I have a lot of respect for this quiet young man whose Dad literally followed him to Marine Corps Boot Camp in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and hung around writing about the “Father-Son” experience. If I had been an 18 year old John on the first great thing of my life, I’d have been embarrassed as hell to have my North East liberal former Jesus Freak hippie father hanging around. But John wasn’t, or if he was, he kept it inside and, instead, contributed some excellent writing to the book he and his Dad wrote.

John is also the hero of his Dad’s finest work of fiction, “Baby Jack,” a book born from the terror that Frank Schaeffer lived every day that his son was at war, dreading every day the thing that never happened to him and Genie, the arrival of a Marine Corps limousine carrying an officer and a chaplain to their home on the Charles River upstream from Boston, Massachusetts, that they have there and where they raised their children, including John, and now help raise some of their grandchildren, including Lucy.

Frank knew in his heart for the terrible years that his son John was in harm’s way that NOW the Old Testament’s god of wrath had him where this vengeful god really wanted him for all the blasphemies Frank had said and written about this god in the years since Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had wandered away from his own once-seemingly vibrant or, at least, zealous faith in the real Jesus Christ who Frank is no longer even “certain” is “real.”

But the Death Notification Team never did pay a visit to the Schaeffer family home upriver from Boston, Massachusetts, where so many other American martyrs had laid down their lives on the alter of Liberty. Instead, John came home from the wars, went to a prestigious college, got a good job, married a beautiful woman, had three children at last count, and built a house up the street from his parents where his Dad does nanny duty with the pre-school children and chauffeurs the ones in school, while he also paints and writes and does his level best to help save the planet and all the other adults go to work at their various jobs.

Frank has written how grateful he is to my possibly imaginary Friend during the times when he temporarily does believe in Him for bringing John home safely from war and also about the terrible guilty grief he says that he feels for all the parents of John’s Marine Corps buddies whose parents did get the visit that broke their hearts and crushed their souls.

It seems that my possibly imaginary Friend is not in the retribution racket.

If He was . . . we’d ALL be dead.