Christopher's Sculpture

Christopher Tomko (2/14/07)

The Valentine's Day Wednesday of June's memorial service saw all these threads woven together during the reception afterward in our Savannah home. Imagine with what interest we pieced together the story of how events unfolded around June that day, beginning with what we knew of Melissa's intercessory experience. Then, Cecilia shared about the rainbow and sang her beautiful song, Dancing with Jesus. Afterward, Marcie shared her vision of the garage, with immediate and stunning confirmation supplied by June's nephew.

Then, after most of the guests departed, Christopher, Cecilia's husband, pulled me aside. He told me that he had been working on a sculpture for the past few years. It was in the back of their van. Would I like to see it? I followed him out, completely unaware of how profound the moment would become. There in a bas-relief was the exact representation of what Marcie had just described to me in private a woman dancing in heaven. Not just any woman, but one exactly aged and dressed as Marcie had been shown, right down to the low back of the gown and the long scarf flowing around her.

When I caught my breath, I took Christopher inside and gave him Marcie's description of her vision that she had written for me before leaving earlier. As he read it, Christopher sank into a chair looking like he'd seen a ghost. In fact, he told me that he had been shown the woman dancing in heaven in a vision several years earlier and felt commissioned by the Lord to sculpt what he had been shown. He then said that he had always wondered why the woman was dancing with such a long scarf, but since it was in the vision, he kept it in the sculpture.

Curiously, he also said that when he first finished the sculpture, he realized that the face he had sculpted looked like that of our daughter, Alisha. Since he didn't want Ali tagged with being so closely associated with the dead woman in his sculpture, he quickly changed that part. As it happens, Ali and June look a lot alike. I marveled that Christopher had not only been shown Marcie's vision but had sculpted it in time for bringing it to June's memorial service never realizing the connections which would be made after he arrived. Not only that, but it also seemed that he had been shown a face very similar to June's on the person he was shown years before who was dancing so exuberantly in heaven.

May she be dancing still!