Created during my time at Christ Covenant

Why does God say no?

We often expect God to fulfill our desires on our terms. Through the lens of an artist’s canvas, Kind to Withhold explores how unanswered prayers can become gifts, and how beauty is born from brokenness.

This is a meditation on how God meets us not only in fulfillment, but in the ache of waiting—where withheld desires give way to a deeper joy in Him.

With Growth Comes Change

In a small church, you’re often not far from another’s story. As Christ Covenant grew from a small church to a larger body, the sense of collective intimacy began to shift.

Kind to Withhold was created to press back against that drift. By sharing the journey of one artist, the film aimed to remind us that the Lord’s work in an individual’s life is seldom given for that person alone. When shared, these testimonies become our stories - gifts to build up the whole body.

The project also carried a secondary purpose. Artists were a small minority within the church. By highlighting an artist’s work, we sought to affirm their place in the body and to remind the church to see beauty not as peripheral, but as a vital expression of God’s grace in our midst.

Laying the Ground Work

For the Storytelling ministry at Christ Covenant, Kind to Withhold became something of an Ebenezer stone; a refinement of vision. The idea of “our stories” that this film embodied went on to shape nearly every project that followed.

You can see the thread carried forward: in the VHS tapes woven through the five-part series Life in Babylon, and in the voices of different members reciting the church covenant & service pledge in Our Covenant & Serve the Church.

In a culture of stout individualism, it can be easy to forget that our faith is not designed to be solitary. To belong to Christ is to also belong to His church. From this project onward, it became our conviction that, when possible, our storytelling should point the individual back to the life of their community.