Painting Through the Fog

Claude Monet spent the last three decades of his life painting water lilies in his garden at Giverny, France. What many people don't realize is that during some of his most productive years, cataracts were slowly stealing his sight. The world grew muddier. Colors shifted. Edges dissolved into haze. Yet Monet kept painting.

His later canvases grew bolder — sweeping strokes of amber and rust replacing the delicate blues and greens of earlier work. Some critics dismissed these pieces as the sad decline of a master. But Monet refused to stop. He painted not what his failing eyes could see, but what his heart knew was there: beauty beneath the blur, color behind the fog.

In 1922, despite near-blindness, he committed to completing his massive Water Lilies panels for the French state. Those works now fill two oval rooms in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, surrounding visitors in an immersion of light and water that takes the breath away.

Hope works like that. It is not the ability to see clearly. It is the willingness to keep painting when the world goes dark, trusting that beauty is still there even when our eyes cannot find it. Paul wrote, "We hope for what we do not yet see" (Romans 8:25). Like Monet at his easel, faith invites us to trust what we cannot yet make out — and to keep reaching for the light that God promises is coming.