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Some words are worth coming back to, time and time again. The words of a prayer our mother taught us. Our wedding vows. A line from Scripture that carried us through a difficult season. The words of the Creed, proclaimed Sunday after Sunday since we were children.
These words are worth remembering because they tell us something true about God, about ourselves, about life.
In 2018, I was an amateur artist opening an Etsy shop, wondering about what to call it. I settled on Letters to the Lord - that's what I was literally writing, so it seemed fitting. And since that beginning, I've grown more and more attached to my tagline: Closer to God, one letter at a time.
That's always meant something very specific for me. My art is first and foremost a reminder to pray. Not just for you to say the words - we do that all the time - but for me to actually pray. Writing them slowly forces me to pay attention to them. Designing them gives me another opportunity to consider them. And eventually, they become something that can sit on a wall and quietly speak those words back to us.
When I'm writing the words of a prayer, I can't rush through them in quite the same way. I have to think about every letter. Every space. Every line. When every letter is a prayer and a gift to God, that's when I feel like I've really started praying.
And sometimes a familiar prayer suddenly becomes unfamiliar again - not because the words have changed, but because I've finally stopped long enough to notice them.
That's why so much of my work begins with words that the Church has been praying for generations. The prayers aren't mine. The beauty of them isn't mine. I'm just slowing down, noticing them, and remembering them.
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