#1 Prophecies, Jonah & Heaven
Welcome to my first journal entry!
Over the last two years, I've taken a step back from painting because I felt the Lord calling me to pursue it in a different way. I had a sense of conviction that I should stop selling art through social media. My husband, Preston, and I had just moved to LA from Atlanta in January of 2022, and I felt I should reevaluate how to approach my career in a new city.
One day in the spring of 2022, after spending hours making Instagram reels and my eyes feeling exhausted, I went for a hike. I felt in my spirit that I would sell art in person and not online. As I was hiking a woman came up and asked to walk with me. She mentioned living in Beverly Hills and offered to host me at her house, inviting her friends to view and purchase my art. Although I didn't pursue this opportunity, I felt that God was showing me He would provide a way for me to sell art in person if He was calling me away from the relentless hustle of social media.
A few weeks later, on June 2, 2022 I reached out to a friend to pray for me because I was feeling low and discouraged about next steps for art. She responded 30 minutes later with a long text of everything she heard from the Lord. She said God stopped her and said, "I have so much to say to you about Katie."
She shared insights about my childhood that no one could have known. She continued, "The Lord said that you would exist in Heaven and in the spiritual realm more than the physical in this life. Your paintings will show people Heaven. You'll start painting in a new way that bridges the spiritual and the physical. People who know God will look at your paintings and see the spiritual realm—as if they were wearing 3D glasses. It will look different to believers and non-believers, but it will speak to non-believers in a way that makes them question, wonder, and seek. I have a picture of your work as a gateway—a swirling, alive picture, like something out of Harry Potter. You'll have access to show your work to the right audiences; the right eyes will find your work for the right purposes and spaces, and God has a plan for it."
This was a lot to process, and I didn’t fully grasp most of it. Was the part about Heaven metaphorical? What exactly is the spiritual realm? I barely understood prophecy, let alone, this.
Then I remembered the spring of 2021, a year earlier. I was in a season of reading the Bible for hours a day and feeling the most spiritually alive I had ever felt. I had been asking Him, "What do You want me to paint?" I was transitioning from painting home portraits to creating a body of work to release in collections for the first time.
During this time, I felt an odd, inexplicable desire to paint visions of Heaven.
Why? No idea. But God had planted this dream in me. I gave it one, half-hearted try and painted a place I saw in my mind that had a tree swirling like it was alive next to a river and mountains with sharp peaks in the distance. However, I quickly dismissed it. I thought it was too vulnerable or even worse, not accurate and so at the time I decided it was not a good business model. Instead, I focused on painting interpretations of music and lyrics—my Jonah moment, saying, “No, I can’t do that. Give me something easier.” Even so, God was gracious and blessed my creative journey that year.
A year had passed now and I had completely forgotten the seed the Lord had planted in my spirit. I felt a pang in my stomach when it all came back to me. I rushed to search my phone's photo history to find the one painting I did that I hadn't told anyone about, the painting that is in this post. As I looked at it I began to realized that you can't outrun the will of God. The Lord had told me quietly, one year ago, that I would paint what was just now prophesied to me.
"Yes, I have spoken; so I will also bring it about. I have planned it; I will also do it." Isaiah 46:11
On June 4, 2022, two days after receiving the initial prophecy another friend came to me and said “as I was driving over here the Lord stopped me and said that He had so much to say to me about you”. She pulled me into a room and started crying, she said it was so beautiful she didn’t think she could get it out. After I begged her, she said “you will be a bridge between the spiritual realm and the physical realm and you will start painting prophetically what you see.” She said that she saw me like a tree and my roots were going out to different cities and nations and binding up divisions.
I sat on the bed, barely knowing how to absorb these words. I was so shaken that God had given me this message twice. I remembered the scripture in Genesis 41:32: “The Lord gave the dream to Pharaoh in two ways, because God has established that it will happen, and it will happen soon.”
I began reading books by people who had experienced similar things to what the prophecy said, which was incredibly helpful. The first book I read was a collection of journal entries from a group of women in Los Angeles, half a century before my time, called “Ladies of Gold.” In the preface, it said, “Some people joked that Francis Metcalf existed in Heaven and the spiritual realm more than the physical in her life.” I nearly dropped the book right there.
This is the beginning of my journey. These journal entries will serve to share the love of God and the remarkable ways He has made Himself evident in my life. I’ll be sharing the things I've seen and the discoveries that have led to the coming artwork.
My desire is to glorify God and for you to be stirred in your spirit to seek Him. I have grown immovable in my conviction that God has unending love for us and that He can be found (literally, not metaphorically) by those who seek Him with all their heart.
