Give Me This mountain. Oil on board. 48x72”

Walnut Hill Community Church is entering into a new season of forty days of prayer and fasting. After a year marked by tragedy, loss, death, and sickness, (our church is only minutes from Sandy Hook, CT) our leadership believes that this is a season to say “Enough!” We are choosing to look to the Lord in this season and declare his Supremacy, and take a posture of ‘Holy Defiance’ against these attacks, reclaiming the inheritance God has given us! Walnut Hill is calling this a “Caleb Moment”, a moment when God takes us to a mountaintop and shows us our inheritance once again. A large part of our assignment and inheritance in our region of western CT, and we are to demonstrate the reality of God’s Kingdom come to the communities in region as a gateway to all of New England. Like Caleb, we are to look out upon the daunting mountains of resistance in our territory and declare to God, “Give Me This Mountain!”.

This painting was metaphorically painted on top of the former iteration “Moving Mountains”, a prophetic image documenting the season of our church several years ago, when we were called to take a posture of joyful worship as the catalyst for God’s heart to be released in our region. Only shadows of the former image now show through, embellished now with gold and silver leaf, offering a rich layer of textures to the surface and showing through in new and surprising ways; as in the robe of Caleb that looks strikingly like Joseph’s technicolored coat (a symbol of his prominent inheritance of Abraham’s covenant). The posture of the worshippers, the mountain, and the the prophetic “trumpeter” remain as well.

My special thanks to Peter Briggs for these amazing photos. I was painting the people of Israel coming into the promised land across the bottom of the painting while he filmed and photographed, bringing light and life into their inheritance while reclaiming the territory.