Grief scatters us, leaving the pieces of who we are spread across a floor. And we don’t know how to gather them.

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As I sought to piece my life together after my father’s death, and the turmoil of thought, I knew that I had to attend the women’s conference at Catch the Fire in Toronto. It was there that I spent many hours on the floor of the sanctuary simply soaking. I had never soaked before. Yet I found, in this laying down, in this secret place, a quiet expectancy that His love was about to renew and repair the broken pieces.

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Never could I have imagined the journey of joy and restoration that I was about to embark upon. But, that’s the kind of Father He is. Whatever the enemy has tried to take away, God wants to restore. He is the One who keeps rewriting my story, and yours, with daily grace into a redemptive epic of love divine.

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In the fall of 2013, I found myself enrolled in a beginners’ painting class at our local art gallery. I had vague memories of enjoying art as a young child when we still lived in the northern part of England. But, I had never picked up a paintbrush in all of my adult life. I was fifty-six years old.

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I remember feeling such a sense of wonder as I looked at the simple scenery I was creating. My soul felt like it had tapped into a well so deep that there was no end. It was Living Water, and He began to quench the hungry thirst of my broken soul — and in the process, bring restoration to a gift that had been deeply buried.

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The gift of creative expression does not simply distract us from pain — it knits and heals the broken pieces back together into something beautiful. God is also the Author of new beginnings, of new chapters. We are never too old for Him to surprise us.

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That first canvas became the first of many — a calling, each painting a small prophecy of what God was already doing in the unseen places of my heart, declaring restoration before our eyes could fully see it.