This watercolor painting is a portrait of women who have overcome the effects of the fall by putting on the whole armor b of God and fighting against the enemy's lies about their purpose, origin and status as God's children. No longer living as orphan's these women LISTEN and affirm the power of the Holy Spirit as they take back the stories of their lives and rewrite them with the particularities of God's plan for deliverance.

The following is a fuller disclosure of how these Overcomers joined the battle against evil in their lives first and then the lives of others.

Overcomers – Now and in the Future

Long after dystopian novels raged,
longer still after they became passé,
we learned The Eternal is not myth but

the essential
and believing only the present –
nothing beyond and nothing before,

is robbery.

We remembered when lies blew out the light and
the lives we lived partially blind, imprisoning all we held precious.
Gathering as friends, we saw in each other’s faces
remnants of what was too holy to murder
with forgetfulness.

We listened to the accounts of our internments –
one of us kicked in her own blood,
another wandered lost in the valley of the shadows,
another, wind-blown and tossed,
carried water for others
while bearing her own unquenched thirst.

Others of us witnessed demons.
Others, the blood-letting of fake love and
yet others, the disintegration of sound thinking.

Reunited by the beauty of faith, we watched
truth free us as we named where we fell,
how we were captured and
what happened in our imprisonment.

Freedom, we reminded ourselves, is not deed upon deed,
but a door through which we fell headlong once let go
and saw ourselves as God’s cathedrals.

And there we were and here we are,
bathed in tears, echoing with desire,
unashamed of longing and
free to trust contentment.

Having overcame, we
continue to overcome and
overcoming cannot pass
from us for we love the author
of our lives even unto death.

Tonia Colleen Martin

This is an original work of art. Watercolor and ink. Black frame with a 3" white mat. 2,000.00 Contact: Tonia Colleen Martin, tonia.colleen@gmail.com; www.toniacolleenmartin.com