The Skeptic 36 x 36 oil on panel, framed by the artist

Although God is unseeable, His miracles are happening all around us, in fact, right in front of us. And yet we hold onto our past, we lug around our shame, our outdated paradigms, our “sins,” which are not our wrongs, but our fears, because they are what we “know.” They are familiar to us. Faith is about what we cannot see; it calls upon our imagination and hope amid the bleakness of doubt and the dullness of ignorance. The spiritual realm exists in a different quantum dimension, into which we are given only rare glimpses. Our redemption is standing tight in front of us, but we cannot see it. Perhaps it is our imagination, whether that is faith in nothingness or the pearly gates, that connects us to that vision into other realms. So, because we cannot explain these miracles within the limits of what we can perceive in our current form and we discard these glimpses as unverifiable, therefore untrue. We turn away from the perfectly lovely alternative of grace because we lack imagination.

So, how do we wrap our imaginations around some supreme authority, with the wisdom and the power to create and to destroy? Humankind has created an endless array of methods and scenarios to bring about its own demise. Will God one day destroy the earth or will man step in and do it for Him? We may never know. So we extrapolate the myriad of answers to the never ending questions, each according to his own agenda and call it faith. And yet, the fact is none of us can alter the truth of what is un-seeable and unknowable.