Trudie's Home Going

Trudie was an older woman who sometimes attended our church.
She was small and frail, using a walker to get around.  She had lived a long life with many ups and downs, but which seemed from the outside, to be mostly downs. Her daughter Natalie, was a regular attender.

Natalie became a great friend of mine, sharing a love of making prophetic art. She went with me to Israel in 2016. A lovely, delicate flower of a woman who seemed be having as much trouble in her adulthood as her mother did.

But where Trudie had floundered in her faith, her daughter had clung tenaciously to Jesus because she sensed that to lose her relationship with Him would have made her life much, much more painful. Simply put, Natalie trusted Him.

Trudie had made a confession of faith years ago but the trauma of her  life and the inability to surrender her pain to Jesus meant that she often questioned her faith and how the Lord fit into her life.

Trudie passed away last month. Finally able to slip her bonds of pain and trauma, she rests with Jesus now. Her last name was Winters, and she was born on Christmas Day.


Last month our church had its usual third Sunday “Prophetic Art” Sunday and I had planned to paint. In our church, two or three artists sit or stand in the front of the church. Our easels and paints are set up and while the worship team creates an atmosphere of warm connection, we paint. Then we give the paintings away to whoever we sense the Lord is asking us to give them to.

The week before a Prophetic Art Sunday I start to ask the Lord what he wants me to paint. I keep an open mind and He tells me, pretty pointedly, what He wants me to paint. I may not know until that Sunday who the Lord wants me to give it to.

So, a few days before, Jesus told me to paint someone ice skating, with their back to the observer, skating off toward the horizon with trees to one side and a bright sunrise in the sky. But as it turned out, I was sick that morning and didn’t get to participate. I thought I knew who it would be for, though. (I was wrong!)
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Monday morning I woke up feeling fine and the Lord asked me to please finish the painting. It would have been finished in church the day before it I hadn’t been sick. So I finished it. And when I was just about ready to call it finished, I found out that Natalie’s mom had suddenly stopped breathing, suffered cardiac arrest and was not expected to live. And suddenly I knew that the painting was for Natalie! Trudie passed away on Wednesday. She was the person skating away on the frozen lake in the bright red jacket. (As red as the blood shed for her.) I called the painting, “Trudie’s Home Going.”


Right now the painting is hanging in the church, in our special spot to hang prophetic art, but when the time comes to change out the paintings, Natalie knows that one’s for her.

For me, the greatest part of this prophetic gift was telling Natalie about it. I was able to show her how much Jesus loves her and her mother and how Trudie skated away to be ever present with the Lord.

When we remember who we are and who’s we are, we allow ourselves to be used by the Lord in amazing ways!