The Invitation

In 1990, while I lay in my bed, I could do little more than draw chalk designs on a sketchpad. I remember creating two drawings—one of a woman’s neck with a sparkling necklace and another of several straight-lined buildings in a city. These were very simple drawings in the brightest of colors. There was no detail, only lines moving in different directions. These lines were simple, and they took little concentration. Though I was cognitively impaired at the time, I still remember the thoughts I had while drawing these pictures and the images I wished to create.

Six months before completing this book, I had an afternoon with nothing to do. I decided not to plan anything that day, for I wished to see what might grow out of the emptiness. I went into the garage, and not liking its cold dampness, I opened the large door facing the mountains. Sunlight fell upon a shelf so that a white box, labeled “1990,” caught my eye. Feeling pulled to this box, I opened it. Touching the weakened rubber band until it snapped, and opening a roll of artwork, I was coaxed by the bright colors and enchanted by its fairytale quality. There in my hands was the only thing left from my bed during seventeen years of illness.

As I uncovered these drawings, I remembered clearly my intention when I drew them. Yet, at the time I created these designs, they had been unrecognizable to me. Only this day, in the cold, damp garage, did I see the resemblance of these drawings to a diagram God recently had given me in a vision. I was told it was the origin of the human spirit. It didn’t take long to realize that this diagram was the very same drawing I had sketched from my bed in 1990. Now in wellness, it came to me with labels from God. This moment in the garage was beyond words. How could I have been so sick, and yet, casually have created these exact drawings?

In the old roll of pages, there were other drawings—of buildings I now recognized as churches. I remember my intention at that time had been to draw buildings. I was raised a Jew, and churches were not what I drew in those days. Churches were nonexistent in my life or in my consciousness. Yet this day in the garage, I could see that while so very ill, I unconsciously had drawn churches with crosses on the doors and large steeples on the rooftops.

Before seeing these drawings and since becoming well, I have been working in churches—the very same churches that were in those drawings from 1990. I could come up with no explanation for this. It confounded me. The drawings I found in the garage from a time I was living in bed were prophetic. The deepest of all messages were in this reality. God’s wish for me—my destiny—was in this reality.

What I realized on that empty day in the garage is this: that we never fully awaken to the sacredness of our lives. God sits with us each and every day from within the emptiness. The seventeen years of sickness was not downtime. God had been working inside me. While I thought I was wasting my life in the void and emptiness of illness, God had been busy. I was being kept confined in a cocoon, while inside, a butterfly was being woven from my heart. One day, when the sky was bright and the wind was perfect, my heart burned through the cocoon, and God set a butterfly free.