Yesterday completed my ten-day solitude retreat at Nada Hermitages. Today finds me back at home with all of the regular routines of taking Caleb to school, fixing the sprinkler system which broke (again!) while I was gone, etc, etc.

The ten-days a Nada was fantastic, rejuvenating, and in some ways surprising. Since the work of the Spirit is an ongoing work, I am a little reluctant to publically process the retreat yet, as God is still showing me things that he did and is continuing to do. Once again appealing to Emilie Griffin in her book “Wilderness Time” she writes that it is important to take some time with God two-weeks after the retreat to read through journal entries, reflect, and allow God to remind you as well as show you more of what he did. I am typically not much of a journaler, however, I did write just about everyday for which I am grateful of that record of where I was at certain points.

I will share with you one important way Jesus led my praying during the retreat. This falls under the heading of one of those “surprising” happenings. It happened the morning of May 5 when after having already painted a couple of images that brought me joy, I heard Jesus say that he wanted me to do portraits of all three people in my life who are most important to me: Heather, Caleb, and Micah. On top of that Jesus said that I should be in a posture of prayer for each individual as I worked on his or her portrait. Looking at my journal from that morning, it is obvious that I thought this was a leading for that day; by the end of that day though, I realized that this was the primary way that Jesus wanted me to spend the balance of the retreat time.

Each painting, starting with “Caleb’s Prayer” took about 6 – 8 hours. Now if you had told me before that I was to spend that kind of time intentionally thanking God and interceding for that person, I would have laughed at the impossibility for me of doing that. But I was surprised at how easy it was to focus prayerfully on each of these people whom I love so much! I also became aware that there was a great deal of wordless interceding going on as stroke by stroke I applied lines and washes of color that slowly revealed images of my loved ones. The title for the series became obvious as the portraits themselves captured my (and God’s?) prayers for these individuals much more than the expressed words and thoughts in the moments that they occurred.

“Caleb’s Prayer”

“Heather’s Prayer”

“Micah’s Prayer”

That is all for now – I have to take Caleb to his Children’s Music Academy lesson. Thanks so much for all of your prayers and comments. More to come soon…

David