Untitled; 2017; 15″ x 20″; mixed media: monotype, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, oil pastel, lithograph crayon.

Many times for me, painting is a language I speak to myself – to affirm what I know to be true and thus to persuade my own heart to believe. The physical world around me, in a similar way, constantly whispers metaphors to me concerning spiritual truths.

In this painting, for example, I wrestle with Newton’s third law of motion, as defined by Khan Academy:

If an object A exerts a force on object B, then object B must exert a force of equal magnitude and opposite direction back on object A.

This law represents a certain symmetry in nature: forces always occur in pairs, and one body cannot exert a force on another without experiencing a force itself. We sometimes refer to this law loosely as action-reaction, where the force exerted is the action and the force experienced as a consequence is the reaction.

Of course, any of us can prove this law to be true, as manifested in our physical world. Sit on a chair and you will experience it. But lately I’ve been trying to convince my soul to trust the same principles at work in the spiritual world.

Sometimes, God pulls back the curtain of eternity and reveals to us the grand purposes He is accomplishing through our pain, “the force experienced as a consequence of the reaction.” But sometimes the curtain is like lead, firmly held in place, blocking our earthly perspective. Then comes the invitation to believe what we cannot see – that for every moment of suffering, every dark weary night, there exists a mirror image in the spiritual realm of joy and light. An image perhaps we won’t see until we cross to the other side of the mirror.

This painting is my statement of belief in what I can not yet see.