Oasis

Inspired by El Roi — “The God Who Sees Me.”

Wounded, rejected, and overwhelmed by shame, she fled into the wilderness and found herself in a place that seemed barren of everything: safety, belonging, and hope. And yet, that is where God found her. "Oasis" began as a reflection on that encounter, but as the painting developed, its meaning became deeper. The woman emerging from the desert appears almost transparently within the figure of the woman standing before us. They are the same woman, existing at different points in her story. One carries the wounds of the wilderness. The other carries the evidence of having survived it. The transparent figure represents the woman who once wandered through the desert—wounded, searching, and unseen. The woman in the foreground represents what happens when that same woman allows herself to be found, held, and transformed by God's presence. And eventually, what was once a place of barrenness became the place from which something new could flow.

This is the paradox at the heart of "Oasis": sometimes God does not remove us from the wilderness. Sometimes He transforms us within it. Because before you ever found your way back to Him— El Roi found you first.