On Creating with the Good Voice

There's a voice I've learned to listen for when I sit down to create.

It doesn't announce itself. It's not loud and it doesn't give directions like a foreman on a job site. But when it shows up, I know, because the work changes. It gets bigger than what I intended. More true than what I planned. More alive than anything I could have engineered on my own.

I call it the good voice. And I believe it's the Holy Spirit.

I know how that sounds. A few years ago I would have rolled my eyes at myself too. But I'm not writing this to make a theological argument. I'm writing it because if you're a creative person who's found faith or who's somewhere in the middle of finding it then maybe you've felt something similar and just didn't have words for it.

Here's what my process actually looks like.

I start with something I've been carrying. An image, a feeling, a line from Scripture that's been following me around for days. Something I haven't fully figured out yet. I bring that into the work — I open Midjourney, I start moving — and somewhere in that process, something shifts. I'll land on an image that takes my breath away. One I couldn't have arrived at by being clever or intentional alone. Not because the tool did something magical. Because I was open. Because I was listening.

That's the collaboration. Me showing up with something. Him meeting me there and making it more.

The work I'm most known for, the cinematic pieces, the bold ones, the ones people say they can feel when they look at them. I can't take full credit for those. The weight in them, the way the light sits, the thing that stops people mid-scroll and makes them save it to a board they'll come back to - that's not all me. That's what happens when you stay open instead of trying to close the gap between what you imagined and what's actually arriving.

The good voice doesn't make the work easier. Sometimes it asks more of me and more honesty, more willingness to scrap what I made because it was just me being clever instead of being true. More trust that what feels like a wrong turn is actually a detour I needed.

But the work it leads to is always more alive.

If you've ever felt like your creative life and your spiritual life exist in separate rooms, I want you to know they don't have to. The God who spoke the world into existence is not allergic to your art. He's not waiting for you to stop being a creative and start being more religious. He is already in the room.

The only question is whether you're listening.

I'm still learning to. Every single piece.