My Stand-up Jesus

My Stand-Up Jesus

I have a four-foot concrete statue of Jesus I purchased in a junk shop a decade ago. When I asked the shop’s owner if it was for sale, she replied that everything was for sale but that she was partial to “Jesus” because he was a gift from an old boyfriend.

An old cemetery-robbing boyfriend, I thought, but I didn’t say it. When I asked her the statue’s price, she gave me an outrageous number. I said thank-you and moved on—but each time I returned to her shop, the statue was still standing near the door.

When I stopped in one rainy afternoon, the owner I’d previously met was gone. Two cowboy-looking fellows were casually presiding over the junk at hand, and I smelled opportunity.

“Is that statue outside for sale?” I asked. “The one of Jesus?”

“All this stuff is for sale,” one of them answered with a vague wave of his hand.

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

The cowboy drawled a price that was less than a quarter of the one originally quoted by the absentee owner. In less than five minutes, stand-up Jesus was being loaded into my trunk.

While I still have a bit of residual guilt about the manner in which he was acquired, I treasure my statue. Having a four-foot Jesus is a constant reminder of the one whom I offer my love and owe allegiance to, and he’s started many interesting conversations.

Moving stand-up Jesus is not great fun. (Last time I moved, it took two grown men and a dolly to relocate him.) But I can’t imagine my home without him. I’ve come to count on my statue’s visual reminder that Christ is present with me every day. I’ve come to appreciate that the palm of one hand is scarred (I know!) and that he wears his heart openly on the front of his robe. Simply by standing in plain sight, my concrete Jesus prompts me to open my own hands and heart (and risk their scarring) to everyone who enters my home.

For a long time I thought I was the one moving Jesus, but now I see that it is Jesus always moving me.

He is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being.”

Acts 17:27-28, ESV