First impressions matter. As an old saying puts it: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” A first impression is intuitive; a second impression is not because the first has stamped an image on the mind. A second impression is a reevaluation of the first. Was that first impression correct? If it was not, your mind makes an adjustment.
While at the National Gallery in London, we quickly passed by the portraits of people that had been painted before the invention of the camera, which were all impressive, if predictable. Then we rounded a corner and before us appeared paintings by the Impressionists! What a difference! None were pre-photographic detailed portraits but artists’ interpretations.
The photographic image made a lasting visual impression, in that it forever changed the way people saw things. Photography pretty much killed the posed painted portrait (with the exception of specialty portraiture).
The Box Brownie Kodak camera in the hands of amateurs enabled them to capture instant portraits. During the changeover from still-life portraits to instant photographs the Impressionists arrived! They did so with flourish and their works were rejected by established galleries — even in Paris!
My first view of a Van Gogh painting was not just visual but visceral, due to its impact on my “innermost being” (John 7:38). How the wheel turns — these days the mobile phone has all but replaced the camera. These days it’s fewer first impressions and more quick snaps and video grabs.
What was it about Jesus of Nazareth that made such an impression on the young fishermen on the shore of Galilee that straightaway they left their nets and followed him? Their first impression of Jesus so captured him that they left behind their nets and boats.
My first impression of Jesus at age twenty-one so affected me that I fell on my knees, surrendered immediately, and asked him to be my Saviour. (I knew how to respond because of the many ‘altar calls’ I had resisted over the years during meetings in the Salvation Army.) He did not appear to me but his presence was overwhelming!
The glorified Jesus came to me by the same Spirit that was upon him when he called to those rugged fishermen 2,000 years ago, “Follow me,” he called, and dropping everything they did. The Spirit of God drew them to him immediately. That first impression was both powerful and life changing — capturing as it did a snap of who Jesus was that the labour and love of their lives was lost in an instant!
Jesus does that — as you too will find out when you do what they did, and what I did, and “leave that which you cannot keep in order to gain that which you cannot lose”! But like any treasured snap of an unforgettable moment in time, you must not miss the moment!