There is a mountain in northern Israel that most people only know from a single story. A prophet. A challenge. Fire falling from heaven. If you grew up in church, you probably heard it at least once — the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel, in 1 Kings 18, when he stood alone against 450 prophets of Baal and called on the God of Israel to answer by fire.

He did.

That mountain is where I live.

Not in a symbolic sense. Not as a metaphor. I wake up here every morning. I drink my coffee here. I watch the sun come up over the Carmel ridge and spill gold across the Bay of Haifa. I walk the same ground where a man once knelt with his face to the earth and prayed for rain after three years of drought, and the sky listened.

I did not grow up thinking of this as unusual. When you are born into something, it becomes ordinary. The mountain was just home. The stories were just history. And then, slowly, as my faith grew deeper and my eyes opened wider, I began to understand that where God places you is never 

Mount Carmel means “vineyard of God” in Hebrew. Carmel. The garden, the fruitful place, the place of beauty. Throughout the Bible it is described as a place of abundance, of glory, of encounter. Isaiah speaks of its majesty. Song of Songs compares the beloved’s hair to “the flocks of goats streaming down Mount Carmel.” Elijah did not choose this mountain randomly. The prophets of Israel knew that this ridge, stretching toward the sea, was a threshold place. A place where heaven and earth felt closer together.

I feel that closeness.

On the mornings when I sit in my studio and the light comes through a certain way, or when I stand at the edge of the Carmel and look out toward the Mediterranean, there is something present that I cannot fully name but that I have learned to recognize. A weight. A stillness. An awareness that the ground beneath my feet holds stories that go back thousands of years, and that I am somehow part of that story now, in my own small, ordinary, daily way.

I started Pure Grace because I wanted to make art that carried something true.

The Psalm 91 bracelet I make was the first piece I designed for this brand. I chose that psalm deliberately. It is not a psalm of triumphant moments. It is a psalm of ordinary faithfulness. Of living under the shadow of the Almighty on an average Tuesday. Of trusting that you are covered, even when nothing dramatic is happening and the days feel long and the prayers feel quiet.

That is most of life. The ordinary days. And I wanted to make something a woman could wear on her wrist and feel that quiet certainty on the ordinary days.

People sometimes ask me what it is like to live in the Holy Land as a believer. And I always struggle to answer, because the truth is both more ordinary and more profound than they expect.

It is ordinary because I have bills and deadlines and days when I am tired. The mountain does not lift me above the everyday. My faith is not a constant dramatic experience. I am not walking around in a perpetual state of spiritual awe.

But it is also profound in ways I am still learning to see. Because here, the distance between the ancient text and the present moment collapses in a way I cannot explain to someone who has not experienced it. When I read about Elijah kneeling on Carmel, I am not reading about somewhere else. When I think about the fire of God falling on this mountain, I am thinking about the ground I stood on this morning.

That changes something in you. It roots the faith differently. It makes the stories feel less like history and more like inheritance.

Pure Grace comes from this place. Every piece I design, every print I make, every word I write for this brand is shaped by what it means to be a believer living on this mountain. My slogan is “From the Land Where It All Began” and I mean it with everything I have. Not as a marketing phrase. As a statement of location and identity and gratitude.

I am here. On this mountain. Making things with my hands and my faith and my love for a God who keeps showing up.

And I want everything I create to carry a little of that with it, wherever it goes.

If you are reading this from your home in another country, another city, another hemisphere entirely, I hope something in these words lands. I hope the art I make reaches you. I hope when you hold a piece of Pure Grace in your hands, you feel something of what it means to be rooted in a faith that is ancient and alive at the same time.

From the mountain where it all began, with love and with prayer.