First impressions matter. There’s an old saying: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” A first impression is intuitive; a second impression isn’t because the first has stamped an indelible image on the mind. A second impression is a revaluation of the first. Was that first impression correct? If it was not, your mind adjusted.
While at the National Gallery in London, we quickly passed by the portraits of people painted before the invention of the camera. Then we rounded a corner — and before us were paintings by the Impressionists! What a difference! They were not pre-photographic detailed portraits but interpretations.
The photographic image made a lasting visual impression, in that it forever changed the way people saw things. If “video killed radio”, photography killed the painted portrait (with the exception of specialty portraiture).
The Box Brownie Kodak camera in the hands of amateurs enabled them to capture instant portraits. Before the changeover from still-life portraits to instant photographs, the Impressionists entered the scene.
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. Now it’s fewer first impressions, more snaps and video grabs galore.
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 them that they left their boats behind.
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’ that I had resisted over years of meetings in the Salvation Army.)
It was the glorified Jesus who came to me, by the same Spirit that was upon him when he called to those rugged fishermen two thousand years ago, “Follow me,” he called, and they did. The Spirit of God drew them to him immediately. That first impression must have been powerful and life-changing- capturing, as it did, a snap of who Jesus was, that the labour and love of their lives were lost in an instant!
Jesus does that — as you will find out when you do what they did and what I did, and you too “leave that which you cannot keep in order to gain that which you cannot lose”! That said, like that much-treasured snap of an unforgettable moment in time, you Must Not Miss the Moment!