Desolate Place

2025

Painting, fabric

3’ x 5’

A work created during a season where I struggled to see color, each day overwhelmingly quiet and slow, of feeling unseen. A season of asking if I had been forgotten, asking if the Lord would provide wherever I lay my head? In 1 Kings 17, God sends his prophet Elijah into the wilderness to protect him, and promises to send ravens to feed him. How unlikely the hand of provision would take the form of a bird deemed unclean by the law of the Old Testament. And yet as Psalm 139 ponders, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” In the New Testament, Jesus would often tell his disciples he was going to a desolate place to pray. A land of barrenness, a time wilderness, where one can feel unseen, unheard, can be a place of spiritual renewal. Provision may look like subsistence in seasons of wilderness, but it is provision nonetheless.