Safety and acceptance are a pathway into joy in the middle of the storm for prophetic artists.
Three words that sound simple on paper. But if you sit with them for a moment, you start to realise they are actually a pathway, and that most of us are trying to walk it backwards.
We go looking for joy first. We think that if we can just feel happy, feel inspired, feel that lift in our spirit, everything else will fall into place. But joy, real joy, the kind that holds steady when life is loud and chaotic, does not actually work that way. Joy is the destination, not the starting point. And the road to it runs through safety and acceptance.
Safety, in this sense, has nothing to do with your circumstances. It is not about having a quiet house, a settled season, or a life that is finally behaving itself. It is about knowing, deeply and personally, that you are held. That there is a voice underneath all the noise that says, it is okay, you are safe, stick with Me, and means it.
And the remarkable thing is that voice is not hard to find, because He wants you to hear it. He is not hiding. He is not waiting for you to reach some higher level of faith before He speaks. You do not have to have it all together, or feel particularly spiritual, or even feel sure that you are doing it right. You just have to turn toward Him. That is the whole move. And when you turn your face to Him, even in the smallest, quietest way, trust grows from possibility to reality. And when trust comes, you can exhale and breathe in safety.
From that place of trust, acceptance finds you. It is a surrender but it is not resignation, not giving up, but a clear-eyed recognition that life is going to knock you over and it is okay. A football team does not train in the hope that they will never get tackled. They train knowing they will, and they build their strength around that reality. Acceptance works the same way. You are not trying to live on your tippy toes, carefully navigating around every hard thing. You are learning to stay grounded when the hard things come, because they will come.
There is a beautiful image that captures all of this: the eye of a cyclone. There is a story about a man in the Northern Territory whose roof tiles were torn off in the first half of a cyclone. When the eye passed over and the air went suddenly still, he climbed up to start fixing the damage. Everyone around him was shouting to get down, because they knew what he had forgotten in that moment: the second half of the storm was still coming. This is exactly how it works spiritually. In a season of transition or pressure, the instinct is to fix, to manage, to do something with the brief moment of stillness. But the invitation is to stay centred and grounded in that quiet place with God, and trust that He is the one doing the work.
And joy? Joy happens naturally when you are living from that place. As a prophetic artist, there is a moment you’ll will recognise. It is when you are moving paint around on the canvas, not entirely sure where it is going, and then it shifts. You suddenly feel it. You are in sync. That moment, that quiet electricity of being completely aligned with what God is doing through your hands, that is joy. It is not manufactured. It is not performed. It is found, discovered, ignited!
It is also worth saying that this joy does not belong only at the canvas. The same Spirit that moves through you when you create is present when you are standing in a coffee shop, or sitting with a friend who is falling apart, or simply going about a Tuesday. The gift does not switch off when the paintbrush goes down.
One of the most practical things you can do to build that foundation of trust over time is to keep a record. We can forget how far we have come, how many prayers have been answered, how many seasons we were sure we would not survive and then incredibly, we did. Journal what you are praying. Your history with God is sacred. Look back regularly and let the evidence speak.
And when the next storm comes, there’s no need to fix the roof. You do not need perfect circumstances, a quiet house, or a life that has finally sorted itself out. You are already held. That is the safety we are talking about, the presence of God right in the middle of your chaotic life. Let that lead you to acceptance. And joy rises.
“Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Psalm 30:5.
