January 2024. My father died last month.
Three passions ran through his adult life: Porsches, photography, and his worldview.
The worldview came first, and he held it harder than the other two. He did not push it onto others, because he did not want anyone pushing theirs onto him. But it was very clear: there was no God in it, and no room for one.
My mother’s was the exact opposite of his. She was a woman of prayer.
None of that is incidental to this story. It is the story. A Porsche put my parents on a particular road. A camera caught what happened there. And prayer is what my mother had been doing for months leading up to it, and was still doing in the exact moment it occurred.
One — The Garage and the Beach
Childhood, and a boy who did not yet know God
My dad was a Jew by heritage, but a stout atheist in his beliefs. He was an engineer. He loved Porsches, he loved photography, and he loved his worldview — and he had a strong distaste for anything that opposed it, including God and the things of God.
The Porsche
There was always a Porsche. The first one I remember was an old 356 he rebuilt from the ground up, and my job — I was small — was to stand in the garage and hand him wrenches, sockets, whatever he put his hand out for.
That is my earliest memory of the two of us connecting over anything. It was also one of the very few ways I ever felt useful to him — setting aside the pride I gave him with the occasional athletic victory.
And they were not incidental to me either. My eighth-grade drafting project was a Porsche 944. A few years later, my sixteenth birthday cake was a Porsche 911.
He had put Porsches in my mind.
My mother had put God in my mind. That one would not surface for another twenty years.
Cars, and Porsches in particular, are what kept the two of us connected for the next fifty years.
Our worldviews were what connected us at the start, when mine was simply his. Later they are what made the relationship superficial. In the end they are what disconnected us altogether.
The pictures
His other passion was photography. In the sixties and seventies a camera was high technology, and he was an engineer, so it suited him twice over. He framed his own work and hung it on the walls of his house. He kept dozens and dozens of slide reels.
He was a sailor, too, and a great many of those pictures were boats — sailboats out on the water, and himself out sailing. The sea is where he pointed the camera more than anywhere else.
He had learned photography from his own father — a man estranged from him, and from us, long before I was ever born.
My grandfather left his family when my dad was about twelve years old. He was a well-known political figure in his day, and by every account he was out chasing a worldview of his own.
Worth noticing, in hindsight. It had been done to my father first.
The prayer
Somewhere in a hard season of their marriage, my father gave my mother an ultimatum: give up Jesus, or I will leave the family.
It sent my mother to her knees. For weeks and months afterward she got up before dawn, drove down to the beach, and prayed alone. I am certain there were a great many tears down there that nobody saw.
She was asking God to do something. To intervene. To show her something.
May 1978
Before the reckoning came, my parents took a trip up the coast of California in the Porsche. One of their regular travel rituals, which mostly meant him driving his Porsche.
On the way back, driving south, my mother was praying — praying right then, in the passenger seat, about the very thing that was about to break her family apart.
My father looked up and shouted, “Jesus Christ!”
He pulled the car over, got out, and took this picture.
The original — a 35mm Kodak Ektachrome transparency, processed by Kodak and hand-dated May 1978. The film that was in his camera that day.
When the slide came back from being developed, he dropped it into his projector and showed it up on the wall of our family room. My sister walked in, and he announced his capture to her:
Look — that’s Jesus Christ!
That was the second time he named it — and the two were about a week apart, because in 1978 film had to go away and come back.
The first time was a reflex. A man shouts at a windscreen and grabs a camera. You could put that down to the moment.
The second time was a week later. The slide had been developed. He had it in his hand, then up on the wall of his own family room. He had had seven days to look at it, think about it, and call it a cloud, a trick of the light, a coincidence — anything at all.
He called it Jesus Christ, out loud, to his daughter.
He never showed it to me. My mother did, quietly, a little while later — though that was after he had already left her.
And then it went into a slide reel, and no one saw it again for forty-five years.
But still, on the anniversary of that ultimatum, he left the family. He had kept his word.
My mother kept her faith. How could she not? She had asked for a sign, and to her this was as clear as one could be.
I was a boy taught to appreciate Porsches and the keeping of cars. I did not yet have a mind for pictures or prayer. At the time I would not even have known what the word “worldview” meant — and right through high school I had never once set foot inside a church.
Two — The Red 911 and the Missing Slide
Adulthood, faith, and forty-five years of silence
I was born in 1965. I came to faith in Jesus Christ in the year 2000 — twenty-two years after that photograph was taken, and by then I had no memory of it at all.
The Porsches
There was never a gap. From the 356 he built when I was a child he went to a 924, then a 944, and eventually to his pride and joy: a 911 Carrera Targa, signature red, kept in perfect condition from the day he bought it to the day he died.
Not even a scratch.
Many a birthday and Father’s Day, I went to his house and we spent the day on our cars. He washed, polished and waxed the Porsche. I did the same to my Passat — a German car I could actually afford, which was itself his doing. He raised me on German engineering and taught me to look after a car properly.
That was our relationship, and it stayed superficial. The conflict of worldviews, mixed with his distaste for the things of God, ruled out anything deeper. So: chamois cloths, side by side, once a year, for decades.
And I do not want to sound ungrateful, because I am not. He raised me in a decent neighborhood. There was always food on the table and a roof over my head. He paid for four and a half of my five years of college. Whatever else this story says about him, he provided, and he did it without complaint.
We had many years of real joy together. Superficial, perhaps. But real.
But as my worldview separated from his, he eventually wanted nothing to do with it. And in the end, nothing to do with me.
The pictures
Some years after I came to faith — in 2003 — I asked him, vaguely, whether he still had “a picture of some clouds from when I was a kid.”
I know what you are talking about, but I don’t have it.
Wait. You know what I’m talking about?
I had said nothing but clouds. I never said God. I never said Jesus. Twenty-five years on, out of thousands of photographs, he knew instantly which one I meant — and told me it was gone.
Then, another ten-plus years later, he did something that removes any possibility he had simply forgotten. He digitized his entire life’s work — thousands of images, every slide — and he handed me his collection on a disk.
This picture was not on it.
He went through his whole library image by image. He held this one in his hand, decided to leave it out, put it back in a reel, and kept saying he did not have it.
He did not digitize it. He also did not destroy it. He left it where it might be found one day, or might not.
I’m still not sure what he was thinking. He wouldn’t show it or share it, but he didn’t get rid of it. I think he was still struggling over it. It was too exceptional for a photographer (an artiste) of his stature to throw away such a profound piece. But he couldn’t show it in public. What would that mean to his atheism?
Oh, what torture that might have been.
Two possessions, two opposite instincts
So there were two objects in his life, and he treated them as mirror images. The car he kept flawless and on display. The photograph he kept flawless and buried.
In the one, he had faith and pride. In the other, he had disdain — and yet a deep, entirely private respect of some sort.
At least enough respect not to damage it. And not to give it away to anyone else — including his praying children, when they asked.
He did the same thing with people, and he had learned it early. His own father walked out on him at twelve. He left my mother when he could no longer stand her worldview. Decades later he did the same to me, for the same reason. Three generations, and the same reason every time: a set of ideas held tighter than the people in the room. He loved his second wife and I mean her no disrespect at all — but the worldview he held so tightly is what cost him his father, then his wife, and finally the child who was closest to him.
Where his care actually went
I should be honest about how this felt from the inside, because it is part of the story.
From very early on I understood that the Porsches mattered more to him than I did. That is not a complaint about a car. It is simply what a child works out by watching where a man’s attention actually goes.
His photography said the same thing. Thousands of images, overwhelmingly of what interested him — the water, the road, the boats, the cars. Very little of his family. My stepmother flipped that script, to her credit, and the later years are full of people.
And his worldview mattered more than the people who loved him.
That is the plainest way I know to say it. Those who shared it were kept. Those who did not were, eventually, discarded. My mother. Then me, and my family along with me.
I want to be clear about where I have landed on all this. I am not sad about it. I am not angry, and I am not bitter. I had many good years with my father and I am grateful for them, superficial as they were.
I am disappointed. Disappointed that we never got past the surface. And disappointed that a man could hold a set of ideas so tightly that he would let go of the people who loved him rather than loosen his grip.
Three — What My Father Withheld, and What My Father Gave
Around and after the deaths of my mother and my father
2016 — how my mother went
My mother had heart trouble. Her oxygen had been running very low, and eventually she went in to have it put right. It was not a high-risk procedure and nobody expected what happened.
The weekend before, she was at my house — my sister there, all of her grandchildren around her. We went down to the beach. We ate out a couple of times. Two days of laughter and noise and food and peace. That is the last picture I have of her, and it is a good one.
From the hospital she called me, and she told me she loved me.
She never had the surgery. The nurse said that on the last evening everything in her room was clean and neatly arranged, the way she kept things. She went to the bathroom, came back, lay down on her bed, and a short time later she was gone.
My wife still talks about it. Years later she is still amazed at how peaceful it was — how simple, how quick, how close to perfect. A whole weekend beforehand with her entire family around her, children and grandchildren. Then a quiet, orderly goodbye, with no pain and no distress that anyone could see.
I believe she went in complete peace, ready to meet the God she loved and who loved her.
2016 — and what my father said
My father called the next day with condolences and said something like, “Just let me know if there is anything I can do for you.”
So I asked. Could I simply look through the slide reels for the picture that had meant so much to her — I wanted to show it at her memorial.
I don’t have it. And no — you cannot look for it.
I thought to myself: now I cannot even look through our family photographs.
I learned only recently that my sister asked him for the same slide at around the same time, and was told the same thing. Two of his children, asking separately, neither knowing the other had asked. The same answer to both. And it was sitting in a reel in his house the entire time.
COVID — the second cutting-off
A couple of years before he died, during COVID, my father cut my family out of his life entirely. Not just me — my daughters and his great-grandchildren too.
It is worth saying what that cost him, because he chose it. Of all the children in that merged family, mine was the one still there. The others had moved away. We were the ones at the barbecues, the cookouts, the birthdays, every holiday. We were the family that did life with him.
He cut my mother off because of Jesus. Forty years later, he cut me off for the same reason.
2023 — how my father went
Something happened to him fairly suddenly, and it put him in a hospital bed for about a week.
He was awake for it. His eyes were open — often wide open — and by every appearance he was fully conscious. But he could not speak. Not one word, for a week. And then he drifted off.
People read to him about Jesus while he was in the hospital, in that alert yet unresponsive state — alert physically and visually, but unable to speak a word. He had one more chance, if only inwardly, to turn — the way the thief on the cross turned, with no time left and nothing to offer, and was told he would be in paradise that same day.
I hope beyond hope that he took it. I pray that he did. I do not know, and I never will — that is God’s to know and not mine, and I am not going to stand here and tell you where my father is.
What I can tell you is what I saw, and it is only what I saw. To me, the look on his face was not peace. It looked like fear. It looked like worry and confusion.
I would give a great deal to be wrong about that.
The Porsche
Everyone in the family expected the car would come to me, for the obvious reasons. Fifty years of birthdays and Father’s Days. A childhood spent handing him tools. A lifetime of German cars he taught me to love.
It was not written in the will. My stepmother told me he had left express verbal instructions that I was to have no access to his most prized possession — and she was the one who had to say it out loud, in the middle of her own grief. She was carrying out her husband’s wishes. The decision was his.
He made certain the Porsche was kept away from me. Perhaps a final denouncement of my worldview.
The second reel
The only thing I actually did get at his passing was dozens and dozens of slide reels, almost all of them taken before his second marriage.
Sadly, they were not full of pictures of my mother, my sister and me. They were landscapes. Sceneries. Sailboats. Porsches. Trips to Germany and elsewhere. A few pictures of me over the years, some from when I was small — but not many at all. When I had been through them I sent the reels on to my sister, the historian.
In fairness, that changed later in his life, and my stepmother deserves the credit for it. At her urging he began taking far more family pictures, especially once the grandchildren arrived. Those years are well documented, and she is the reason they are. The reels I inherited are simply from before her — the decades when his camera went to the water and the road.
But during that time, the one thing I really had any interest in was that picture. My father had been clear, more than once and to more than one person, that it no longer existed. I needed to know for sure.
And would you believe I found it?
There it was, in the second reel I searched. It was the only reason I went through all those pictures of his sceneries, his Porsches and his travels. But I did go through the rest of them, hoping to find more than a few scattered pictures of my mother, my sister and me. That is all there were — a few scattered pictures. The rest was landscape, scenery and Porsches.
But as you can tell by now, my heavenly Father has been teaching me that I can trust Him for comfort, conviction and love — all of which are worth immeasurably more than any classic German vehicle.
Months later, over dinner, I showed the photograph to my stepmother without saying where it had come from. Have you ever seen this before?
Oh, they make up those things all the time on the internet.
Which is, of course, the sensible answer. Show anyone an image like this with no explanation attached and that is very nearly the only thing they can reasonably say. I would be amazed by it — but then, I am a Christian. I can see exactly how someone who is not would land where she landed: there is no way that picture is real.
But in this case, ironically, it was not only real. It was the work of her own husband.
For what it is worth, that has generally been the reaction, and it splits cleanly. The non-Christians I have shown it to call it a fake — they cannot imagine this actually happening. The Christians I have shown it to call it a blessing: one more sign, in a believer’s life, that God answers prayer and is real.
So I do not hold her answer against her for a second. But it told me something she did not know she was telling me.
She had never seen it. In forty years of marriage he had never once shown his own wife the most remarkable photograph he ever took.
While I was building this website I called my older sister. We had never once discussed any of it. She is a historian with a mind like a steel trap, and she remembered the projector, the image shining up on the wall, and exactly what he said when he came home and showed it to her: “Hey, look — that’s Jesus Christ!”
Let me be honest about the car
I wanted it. Very much. I am human, and I was raised by the man who taught me to love exactly that kind of thing.
And it hurt. Fifty-seven or fifty-eight years of a good relationship with my father, against two years of no relationship — two years he chose — and at the end his instruction was that I would not have that token of our relationship, and of the thing he seemed to care about more than me.
But in only His way, my heavenly Father, very shortly afterward, handed me the same gift my mother had been handed. I was reminded of what Jesus has waiting for me, and of what He delivers to me every single day — including the day I found that slide in a box of old reels out of an attic.
And it became very clear to me what actually holds value, and what does not. It is love. It is relationship.
That is the story of Jesus. And that is where He points every one of us who will have Him.
What actually happened here
My earthly father spent forty-five years keeping this from me. He denied it to my face twice, decades apart. He left it out of the record of his own life. And at the end he made certain I received nothing he valued.
Two years after he cut me off, and forty-five years after the shutter closed, my heavenly Father handed the picture to me anyway — in a box of reels out of an attic, as the only inheritance I received at the time of my earthly father’s passing.
And my heavenly Father gave me exactly what He had given my mother on that road in 1978: hope, comfort and conviction. The same gift, to the second person in that family who prayed through the loss of this man.
Jesus stepped in both times.
Let me be careful about what I am claiming
I am not telling you this is a photograph of the man Jesus standing in the sky. I do not believe that and I am not going to pretend I do.
What I believe is that Almighty God made everything in heaven and on earth, and that He made this cloud formation too. Perhaps only two people ever saw it with their own eyes. And it seems that only one person ever captured it — or anything like it — on film.
And consider when it happened.
In 1978 the whole world took on the order of ten billion photographs in the entire year. A camera was a deliberate object. Film cost money, developing cost more, and there were thirty-six frames on a roll — so nobody wasted one. You did not photograph the sky — usually because you did not have a camera with you at all, unless you were a professional or a real enthusiast, as my dad was. You photographed a birthday, and you thought about it first.
Today the world takes roughly five billion photographs every single day — something like 1.8 trillion a year.
We now take more pictures in two days than the entire planet took in all of 1978.
So this was caught in a culture that almost never pressed the shutter, by a man who happened to have a camera on a coast road, in the one moment the thing existed — and as we all know, clouds shift greatly in the span of less than a minute.
Both ends of that century point the same direction, and this is the part I keep turning over.
In 1978, with almost nobody holding a camera and every frame costing money, the chance of this being photographed at all was vanishingly small. It was photographed anyway.
Today, with five billion photographs taken every day, for twenty years running, the chance of something like it turning up again ought to be close to certain. It has not.
And if it happened tomorrow, that would be twice — twice, against trillions upon trillions of opportunities.
That it was captured at all is remarkable. That it was captured in the middle of a spiritual fight, by the two people in the middle of it — one begging God to act, the other insisting He was not there — is simply an unexplainable phenomenon.
“Isn’t this just Photoshopped?”
A fair question, and it deserves a straight answer: no, and it could not have been.
This image was made on film in 1978. The first consumer digital camera was still thirteen years away. Photoshop would not run on a personal computer for another sixteen. Tools that generate images from nothing are half a century newer than this photograph. What exists is a physical piece of film with a lab stamp on it, and it can be examined by anyone who doubts it.
Who took this photograph
The photograph is my father’s. It was taken by Michael Harvey in May of 1978.
His eye. His camera. His hand on the shutter. Whatever else is true of him and of this story, that much belongs to him, and I want it said plainly and first.
He never showed it. Not publicly, not in an exhibition, not on a wall, not to his wife of forty years. He told more than one person it no longer existed. For forty-five years it sat in a reel in a box.
I inherited it with his slides, and after his death I registered it with the United States Copyright Office — registration number VAu 1-526-759, title of group Jesus Cloud, year of completion 1978, effective 16 January 2024.
The certificate names me as author, and I should explain that rather than leave you to find it. I am the one claiming this work now, protecting it, and putting it in front of people — which is what the registration is for. But the authorship I inherited is not the same as the making of it.
My father made this picture. I am only the one who finally showed it to you.
My home address and telephone number are blacked out on the certificate. Nothing else on it has been altered.
The gift
The Lord towers over mountain and sea and reaches up into the clouds. He is all powerful. However, He does not use that power to coerce.
He stretches out His arms in love, and offers Himself — the greatest gift, inheritance and promise anyone could ever receive: an eternal life of love, peace, joy and goodness with Him.
And it is free. Almost. The only cost is that you choose Him, and thank Him for what the gift cost Him — the suffering He accepted in advance to pay for your sin and mine. And then “follow Him” — which means do as He taught. Love Him, and love others.
Those two things are not my summary. They are His:
Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. Matthew 22:37–40
My mother accepted that gift. My father was offered exactly the same one, on the same road, on the same afternoon. As far as any of us could see, he did not take it.
It came down to me anyway.
If you have ever prayed for God to do something extraordinary — to give you a sign — you can take my mother’s path. You can look at this extraordinary image as an offer made to her, and at this story, forty-five years later and beyond, as the same offer made to you.
My prayer is that you will not try to ignore it, bury it, or forget it. Like my father, you can’t. He tried all three. He even lied about it. But time ran out on him, and after forty-five years the truth was handed to me.
And now to you.
I pray that you will make the choice that brings you eternal peace and joy — and connects you, in love, with your earthly family, your heavenly Father, and everyone around you, in this life and the next.
The choice is yours.
Opens Calvary Chapel Chino Hills’ “Know Jesus” page. Free. Nothing to buy. Real people, if you want them.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Psalm 19:1