Where He At?

The other day, I received one of those quasi-spam emails from someone. You know, the ones that include links to nice, feel-good stories about our humanity and asks you to pass it along to 10 other people. For some reason, I decided to click the link – Ms. Levander got the same email from someone else at the home email, so we both saw it. Perhaps you also received it – it was a CNN video clip about a young girl who painted images of God. The story is a couple of years old, but bear with me.

Certainly, this doesn’t seem all that significant – we and our kids all have (probably) painted some picture of what God looks like to us. What’s interesting is the fact that this girl (named Akiane Kramarik) is the child of an atheist/non-practicing parents who never mentioned God, who home-schooled, didn’t attend church – basically, there was no discussion or reference to God or opportunity to experience him. A link to the story is provided below.

Youtube Link Here.

A written interview with the same girl and her mother was published on ChristianityToday.com, linked below. Take a read.

Text Link Here.

It’s a really fascinating story of how, in spite of so many obstacles, God’s love managed to break through and touch this girl and help her and her family understand that he is, in fact, real.

But I’m not blogging about this because of Akiane’s story – I’m writing this because of something that we noticed about the differing presentations of the same story from two different resources.

Did you notice it?

In the interview from ChristianityToday.com, Akiane speaks about Jesus Christ, about how he is on her mind and in her words ("I always think about Jesus and talk about Him," she says.), as well as how she searched for a model to assist her in a painting of Jesus. Oddly, however, the CNN story never mentions Jesus. Not a single time, which seems a strange omission given Akiane’s self-described proclivity for thinking & talking about Christ.

Which leads me to the question - where he at?

I’ll preface my comment by clarifying that I wasn’t in the room during either of these interviews, but I’m willing to say that Akiane and/or her mom probably mentioned the name Jesus at least once during the CNN video, considering her statement about Jesus in the ChristianityToday.com interview. That, and the fact that one of Akiane’s signature paintings (“Prince of Peace”) – which was displayed prominently in the CNN video – was undeniably in keeping with our traditional image Jesus.

This begs a number of questions. Why did CNN seemingly scrub references to Jesus Christ out of the interview? Were they attempting to offset their public perception of being unfriendly / indifferent to faith by doing a safe human interest story on God to ‘balance their portfolio’ under the guise of fairness? Were they surprised that Akiane talked about Jesus when they thought they were doing a nice, safe story about just plain ol’ God (the ‘safe’ God, mind you – not that personal God that those Christian nut-jobs prattle on about)? Did someone back in Atlanta tell the producer to tone down the Jesus-talk so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the CNN audience?

Curiously, the segment of the CNN video that pertains to the Christ painting is matched with a description of what God looks like, and they clearly don’t match. What’s ironic is that, despite their efforts, it appears that the producers have succeeded in reinforcing one of the primary points that they were attempting to side-step – that God and Jesus are one in the same, and that by engaging God we also engage Jesus Christ.