A new dream...

I woke up 3 nights ago and didn't fall back asleep. Instead, I grabbed my phone and got on facebook. I started reading the updates and came to a post a dear friend had liked. My friend has a daughter who was born with a heart condition. I follow her blog and posts every time she updates them and my heart is just broken. I was led to another families facebook page where I spent the next 3 hours reading every single post and comment since the beginning of the page, and I cried the whole time. I literally felt pain in my own heart and cried tears for a family, a mom and a little girl I didn't even know. I held my own baby the whole night just reflecting on all it means to mourn and love and pray. I reflected on a mothers love and how hard it would be to watch my baby lie in a hospital bed wondering if her next breath would be her last. I pondered what exactly someone could say or do for me if I was in this situation. I would want comfort. I would want to know that while I was in the hospital with my baby and you were at home comfortable, tucked in your beds...with your healthy children, that you thought of me. I would want to feel like life wasnt happening all around me while I suffered. I would need God.

It happens all the time. I cant shake it. My heart is so full and empty at the same time. If you are in my life, I have cried for you too. I think about you. I pray for you. But most importantly, behind closed doors, I cry for you. I have been aching with this beautiful pain for my whole life and never knew what to do with it. I never thought it meant anything. I just thought I was sensitive. Turns out, God has a plan for this broken girl. There just has to be a reason that I have had so much pain. Pain in my own heart and physical disease myself. And what a beautiful thing to have your life so out of control you have nowhere else to turn but to our only comfort. Our only hope. The only one in control.Turns out, through my own pain and suffering, I have met my savior in these trials and wouldnt ask for a do over if I could. Turns out, he really does exchange beauty for ashes...

So the whole night I was just thinking, what in the world can I do? I cant change things. I cant call people I don't know. I can pray.

And I can make art.

The next day, I painted this. It is a painting I made for a mom and a little girl named Kylie. You can read about her story here. She is a beautiful little girl, Gods finest, the same age as my Grace. And she is waiting it out in the hospital, for a new heart. And reading through her moms facebook posts, I just wanted to get in my car and drive there and hold her and pray for her and...I don't know. This energy must get directed somewhere, for some good.

So I decided that I cant paint a painting for every single soul my heart hurts for but I can make prints! So we are ordering a fancy shmancy new high tech printer to make prints of my original paintings. The details are swirling around in my head and I need to have a God brain. I need to open up myself to these crazy ideas that I have and let God just move. Its his plan anyways right?

My plan is to start making paintings for these heart families and our fallen soldiers and anyone else in the world who just needs something hopeful to look at, and turn them into prints, adding personalized scripture on them digitally. Maybe something that can be hung in the hospital. And it doesn't stop here. I will paint for everyone. I will paint to raise money, I will paint when I am mourning and I will paint when I am joyful. I will just, paint.

I felt it when I was painting the Combat Corpsman Collection.I just wanted every mom and every wife and every single child who has lost a dad or a husband or a son in action, to have some art. I wanted to honor them. I cried the entire time I made it and thought about all the men and women we have lost. Just me, in my kitchen, and some paint. How can God use me?

I believe I can use what God has revealed in me to share hope and comfort and to hopefully be able to donate a portion to research? Could I ask a favor? Could you pray for me? Could you pray that all these details get worked out?

I have no money to give and I am done with the guilt in that. I now see how God has allowed us to get by on what we have been so that I would be forced to do this. I never would have started painting if we didn't have the need for extra income. I didn't even know I could paint. I didn't even know...

So Kylie, I made this painting for you. It has one of my favorite verses on it that started my scripture paintings...Psalm 91. I want to thank you over there in that hospital room for letting me have the privilege of looking into your hearts. Letting me feel pain with you. I feel closer to my own destiny now than ever before because of you, sweet Kylie. And I am praying for you and your whole family, for peace and comfort in this time.

Just remember, God is good. And he is right there with you, even when you don't think he is. He loves you and has a great plan for your life.