There are seasons when the tension between light and darkness feels especially close.

The world feels heavy. We see beauty and brokenness existing side by side. We believe in hope, and yet we cannot ignore the groaning all around us. We know what God has promised, but we are still living in the waiting.

Recently my dear friend and mentor Adrienne sent me something she had read in The God Who Gives: How the Trinity Shapes the Christian Story. Adrienne walked beside me when I became a Christian more than 22 years ago, and through the years she has continued to point me toward truth at exactly the moments I seem to need it.

This time, she sent me a passage about the role of the artist.

It spoke about how art can hold the tension of this world—the glory of creation alongside its brokenness, light beside darkness, magnificence beside pain, and hope never very far from despair.

I read it and thought: This is exactly where I am.

Paul writes in Romans that creation itself groans as it waits for redemption. I feel that groaning—in the world around me, in the lives of people I love, and sometimes within my own heart.

But we are not a people without hope.

In Ephesians 1, Paul prays that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened so that we might know the hope to which He has called us. That truth became an anchor for this new body of work.

These paintings live somewhere in the space between those two realities: the groaning and the promise, the longing and the knowing, darkness and Light, the waiting and the coming. The not yet and the soon.

Again and again, I found myself thinking of the watchtower—a place of expectant waiting. Not passive waiting, but watching. Looking toward the horizon. Trusting that Light will come.

And perhaps this collection feels particularly tender to me because of the season I am walking through personally.

I am a mama about to watch both of my boys fly.

There are moments when I am so excited for them that I can hardly stand it. I see the lives opening before them, the people they are becoming, the adventures and relationships and experiences waiting for them.

And then there are moments when my heart feels as though it is being torn to pieces.

Both things can be true.

Hope not far from despair. Joy beside grief. Gratitude sitting right next to longing.

Maybe you are standing in one of those in-between places too. Maybe your children are leaving home, something you prayed would remain the same is changing, or you are waiting for an answer that has not yet come. Maybe you can see God’s goodness and still feel the ache of living in a world that is not yet as it should be.

I am learning that faith does not always ask us to resolve that tension. Sometimes it asks us to remain in it with God—to watch, to wait, to remember, and to lift our eyes toward the horizon trusting that darkness will not have the final word.

The prophet Hosea reminds us of a God who heals and binds up wounds. I am clinging to that promise in this season.

I know He will be with me as I let my boys go. I know He will meet me in the quiet spaces they leave behind. I know He will bind up the tender places over time. And I know that the same God who has been faithful through every season before this one will be faithful here.

That is what I hope these paintings hold.

Not an escape from the darkness or an easy answer to the ache, but a reminder to keep watch. To remember the Hope to which we have been called. To believe that the groaning is not the end of the story.

To wait expectantly for the Presence of Light.