have read the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel more times than I can count. I read it as a child. I read it as a teenager finding her faith. I read it as an adult sitting in church pews in different seasons of life.

And then I read it standing on the mountain itself.

It was not the same experience.

Something happens when the place you are reading about is the ground beneath your feet. The story stops being history and starts being geography. Elijah did not kneel somewhere abstract and far away. He knelt here. On this ridge. Looking out at this sky. The brook Kishon that ran with water after three years of drought is a real brook. I have seen it. It is still there.

That realness changes everything.

When you live in the Holy Land, the Bible becomes three dimensional. The distances between cities you read about are distances you can drive. The landscapes the psalms describe are landscapes you recognize. When David writes about the shadow of a rock in a weary land, I know exactly what that shadow feels like in July. When the disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee in a storm, I know how sudden and violent those storms can be, because I have watched the sky change over that water in minutes.

This is not about having more information. It is about the text becoming physical. Embodied. Real in your body, not just your mind.

I think about this often when I make art for Pure Grace. I want the women who receive my pieces to feel something of that realness. Not just a beautiful verse. A living word. Something that carries weight because it comes from a place where the weight is still present, still felt, still breathing.

From this mountain, with love,