From the artist:

What is God’s view of the world? What does God plan for this world? This text is all about God’s vision for the earth becoming a reality. It’s all about beating swords into plowshares. It’s all about building peace.

How does this vision come to be? In this image of hands, I imagine how we might actually make God’s vision come to life. 

I listen to Christian rock because it is the only station I can play in the car that doesn’t play curse words for my children to hear. I change the station, however, when the radio personalities come on because the statements are often stanted heavily to a viewpoint that is judgmental at its root. I find this to be an intriguing dichotomy. The music is preaching the gospel, God’s vision; the commentary is perpetuating division. Why do we do this? There must be another way.

There’s a song that often plays on my Christian rock station from Matthew West’s album, Into the Light. The song is called, “Do Something.” The songwriter sees the pain of the world and asks God to do something. “I did, I created you,” God responds, suggesting that with our hands and with our words, God has created us to act in God’s name.

Here, in acrylic on canvas, a man wields a grinder, burnishing the edges of a sword that has been reformed into a plow. Growth, not death; care, not fear. The simple analogy of the sword transformed into the plowshare reminds us that peace is at the heart of all that God envisions for this world. 

How might you make God’s vision come into reality?

—Hannah Garrity