A few weekends ago, I had opportunity to visit the Art Institute of Chicago.  Though I've been to the Institute many times, I never tire of it.  On this day, I spent time in the Institute's world famous collection of Impressionism paintings.  Long a lover of all things Monet, I dallied many extra minutes in the sections reserved for his strikingly colorful and luminous work.
     I looked a long time at Monet's paintings of wheat stacks.  I saw one painted of a wheat stack at summer's end, its strands light and dark brown; one of a wheat stack at autumn's end, its tendrils now a haunting pale emptiness; and one of a wheat stack during winter, slumbering, covered in an early snow.

        

     Three paintings, three seasons, three takes, three impressions of the world Monet saw. Not all of his fellow artists would have seen the wheat stacks as he did, and that's the point.  "I wish," Monet once wrote, "to render what is."  Monet wanted to take what he saw and make it his own, to find himself in it, then take it into his own mental and emotional landscape.  He wanted to embrace its possibilities.
     As do we.  Like the Impressionists, the world may well be before us, as real as any of us, but how we experience it is a reality all our own.
     Similarly, although God is entirely real, he is also big enough to ensure that every one of us can experience him as we are, no more, no less.  Jesus is the way to God, yes, but how we find him rests completely in who we are. 
     Open your heart and find yourself in God.