What Would Jesus See

We almost got through a Christmas season without any sightings, but luckily at the last minute Dan Aaron of Oak Lawn, Illinois, came through.  After helping cut down his neighbor’s cherry tree last year, Aaron kept a piece and put it on his back porch. “About a month later, it started glowing. I looked at it and I saw the picture of Mary,” he says. A few days later he flipped the log over and—lo and behold!—he saw the face of Jesus. Aaron says to see it well you have to “look at it from a distance.” He kept quiet about the log until Christmas Eve, when he  displayed it on the dining room table next to some vegetables and dip. He’s hoping to sell it to finance his daughter’s college education.

Felicia Avila of Norwalk, California, was walking on the beach with her family when she picked up a shell and noticed what she says is the image of the Virgin Mary with Baby Jesus. Others who have seen it agree, though more than one person claims to also see an angel in the upper right hand corner. The 17-year-old thinks it’s a “true sign from the heavens” and plans on keeping it. Add this to other sightings of Mary on the half shell.

An overgrowth of vines atop a telephone pole in Littleton, Colorado, is attracting attention because people say it looks like Jesus on the cross, complete with a crown of thorns. Hopefully the utility company won’t cut it down like the one in Lake Charles, Louisiana, did last year.

An unnamed Arizona teen was eating a bag of dried mangoes recently when he pulled out a piece that didn’t look like the others. As he gazed at it, he realized it appeared to show the Virgin Mary with her hands folded in prayer. Instead of eating it he took a photo of it. He’s saving the dehydrated fruit, though he’s not sure what he’s going to do with it.

A couple of weeks ago, Marce Suarez of Anson, Texas, decided to cut off a low-hanging branch on an old mesquite tree that kept brushing his tractor when he rode by it. He pulled out the chain saw but it wouldn’t start. He got a handsaw but it wouldn’t cut the wood. So he tied a chain around the branch, attached it to the tractor, and gunned the engine. The branch broke off and he dragged it away. When he returned he saw an image in the wood where the branch had been, an image of the Virgin Mary. He built a small shrine underneath, and now friends and strangers have started coming by and leaving plastic flowers. Suarez doesn’t know why the image is there, but he hopes it helps as much rain as plastic flowers.

When Jacob Simmons and Gentry Lee Sutherland of Anderson County, South Carolina, got home from Wal-Mart, where they’d picked up some photos that the store had developed for them, they tossed the receipt on the kitchen table. Three days later, after coming home from a Wednesday night Bible class, Jacob looked down and noticed something was different on the receipt–the image of a face, which he says is Jesus Christ. His girlfriend agrees, saying, “Here’s my question to the doubters, who else has the power to put their face on a check-out receipt but Jesus?”