Blank Canvas | Marcy Gregg

How do you forgive a dead man, particularly when he's your grandfather? Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Our guest today has an incredible story of perseverance in the face of a huge obstacle, losing her memory. It's detailed in our featured resource today.

It's titled Blank Canvas. A Life She Couldn't Remember. Marcy Gregg will tell her story today, and you are not going to want to miss it. You can find out more at our website, FiveLoveLanguages.com.

Click Resources and then Building Relationships right there, FiveLoveLanguages.com. Gary, you have a really good memory, as memory serves me correct, if memory serves me correct. Have you ever thought about what it would be like if your memory was suddenly taken from you?

A short answer is no. Now, Chris, you say I have a good memory, but to be honest with you, I'm at the stage of life where I can't remember the name of friends that I've known for 30 years. I'm talking to my wife, and I'm saying, you know, his son's in the Air Force, honey, you know, I know everything about him, and the name won't come.

So I asked my doctor if it was dementia, and he said, Oh, no, it's just old age, you know, so yeah, but no, I've never experienced anything like Marcy. And I'm really looking forward to talking with her today. I am too. Marcy Gregg, you spell her last name with two G, actually three, G-R-E-G-G. She is an abstract oil painter, whose work is found in private and corporate collections across the U.S. and abroad. If you go to her website, you'll see what we're talking about. She's also a speaker who shares her story of hope, resilience and survival. Today, she wants to help you find beauty in the abstract and hope in the unseen.

I like that. Marcy and her husband, David, thank you. Marcy and her husband, Dev, are the parents of three grown children. They live just around the corner from Gary in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can learn more about her online at her website, marcigregart.com.

That's marcigregart.com. Well, Marcy, welcome to Building Relationships. Thank you, Gary.

It's great to be here. Before we get into your story, tell us a little bit about your art and how you got interested in this lifelong project. Well, I studied art at SMU, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and I fell in love with creating then. The funny thing was I put it all aside to raise my children, and it was on the back burner when I got sick. And so all of that was on hold when I got sick.

So I picked it all back up 15 years ago. Yeah, so from a very young age, you were interested in art. I was. I was. In fact, my mom said I loved it when I was a little girl.

Yeah. Well, as Chris said, you and your husband have three children. When you were 30, something happened that changed everything.

So tell us about it. Well, in 1990, I went to the hospital to have our third baby. We had two boys and a little girl was born. And 36 hours after she was born, I contracted pneumococcal bacterial spinal meningitis. And they literally found me in my room, standing in my bed, screaming, I guess, with my head hurting so bad from a high fever. And the doctors took me down and began to work on me and figure out what was going on.

They called my husband. They told him to come to the hospital immediately, that I was not doing well. By the time he got to the hospital, I was already in a coma. Over the next several days, they began to do everything they could medically. They did one IV after another of different medicines. They even drilled a hole into my skull to relieve the pressure that was on my brain. But nothing worked.

And I literally was getting worse every single day. I was not responding. At the end of that week, the doctors came into my husband and they told him that if I should survive, and it did not look good, but if I should survive, I would be a shell of what he knew, that I would definitely have deficits, great deficits. And they left the hospital. And as they are leaving on the other side of town, something else was going on. Our minister was flying back in from being out of town. And he heard from the Lord.

And he tells the story himself, Dr. David Chadwick. He said he was flying back in and he literally heard from the Lord. And the Lord told him to come and pray over me and to pray life over me, that it was not my time to die. So he comes to the hospital in the middle of the night when he landed back in Charlotte. And he got there and went to the ICU room. And he said that he literally found me near death.

And I was on a ventilator and they really were giving me no hope at that point. And he prayed. And as he prayed, he prayed Lamentations 3, 22 and 23, which says, Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed. For his compassion's never fail.

They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. And after he prayed for a while, he believed that I was going to wake up. And he left the hospital and he went home. And Gary, the next morning, I opened my eyes and I began to wake up. And literally nobody, no doctor, no nurse, no one that was there had any medical reason for my waking up.

I mean, it was truly a miracle. They did not give me a medical reason for waking up, but my family and the friends that were there in the waiting room all knew that it was the Lord. When I woke up and the doctors came to me and I was able to speak after they took me off the ventilator, the problem was, I asked why I was there and they told me that I had had a baby. And I said, No, I couldn't have a baby.

I'm 17. When in fact, I was 30 and I was the wife of Dev and the mother of a six year old little boy, a three year old little boy and a brand new baby girl that was a few floors away in the hospital. And what had happened was my mind had reset. My brain had reset to 17 and I had lost all those years of memory. And I believe that I was 17. And so I'm in the hospital believing this and then my husband, who I did not know was my husband, comes into the room and I'm faced with a man that I don't know is my husband but think he's a doctor. And so I'm faced with this big question of who is he and why is he here. And the only people that I recognize are my mom and my dad and my baby sister who has come to see me.

But I don't recognize my own husband. So it was a very scary time. Wow.

Wow. So your brain, as it were, actually reset to like when you were 17 years old and you didn't remember anything beyond when you were that age? No, I really thought I was still in Dallas, Texas in Baylor Hospital, where I had been at SMU at 17. So how did your husband respond to this new you? Well, I'll tell you, Deb Gregg is amazing. He was the most gentle, the most loving, the kindest man. I don't think he realized at first exactly how confused I was. But when he did, he just, a lot of grace, I think, would be the word grace and love.

Those would be the two words I would use. Well, now, when you saw your children for the first time after you came out of the coma, what happened? Well, it was really cool. And they brought the children to me. And I think that was God's greatest gift to me in this whole thing. There were two really, really special gifts that God gave me. One was that when the children came in, they came to my bedside and I touched them and I knew that they were mine. I knew they were mine. I didn't remember having them.

I didn't remember any of the years with them. But there was something about that bond that a mother has. I don't know if it's a bond that was too strong to be broken and I knew they were mine. And that was God's gift to me because I knew that Cason and Connor and baby Callie were mine, even though I didn't remember giving birth to them. And the other neat thing that God did was at 17, Dev and I knew each other. We had met at SMU when we were my freshman year in college.

I met him. The only problem was he was old. This man was old. He was 32 years old and I didn't recognize him immediately. But the more I was with him in the hospital, the more I began to understand that that 17-year-old or that 19-year-old man that I knew or boy I knew at college was really the same person that was this 32-year-old man. And I began to understand that this was Dev. So that was also a real gift. I just didn't know we were married.

Yeah. Now when you had that sense that the two children in the room were your children, did their names come back at that point or not? Well, Dev had told me their names. He had brought pictures to the hospital and he had gone over and over and over. No, I did not remember names at all when they told me the children's names. In fact, I did not remember anybody's name.

Yeah, yeah. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of The New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . If you'd like to hear a past program, take an assessment of your love language or see our featured resource today, go to our website at fivelovelanguages.com. That resource is the book by Marci Gregg, Blank Canvas, the amazing story of a woman who awoke from a coma to a life she couldn't remember.

Just go to fivelovelanguages.com to find out more. Marci, as I'm listening to you and Gary talk about your story, this feels like a movie to me in several ways, but in some ways you can't make this up. Did you feel like you were living somebody else's story in a sense? Well, right then it felt like a nightmare, and I felt like it was an out-of-body experience when I was actually in it, because everybody was telling me that I didn't even recognize my own name when I woke up. So they were calling me a name I didn't remember initially, and then they were telling me I was married, and they were telling me I had three children, and none of which I remembered. So initially it was like somebody else's life.

Well, as I listen to you and try to put myself in your shoes, I can't even do that. I mean, I can't imagine what that would have been like. Now, the doctors wanted you to go to rehab, but you insisted on going home. So what was it like when you went home? Well, it was very hard.

In one short sentence, it was very hard. I had to act like I remembered so many things. The house, the kitchen, my bedroom, even my closet was an issue for me. My clothes were so strange that they weren't my style anymore. For some reason, the things in my closet seemed really strange to me. I would have chosen different clothes. That's what I remember saying to myself.

These don't even look like clothes I would have chosen. And then when I could drive again, I would get lost, and I couldn't tell anybody I got lost, because if I told anybody I got lost, then they would know I had been lying. So I set myself up for a life that was impossible for anybody to do, and it was exhausting.

It was absolutely exhausting. And I remember asking myself over and over, why did you ever tell people you were ready to go home? But the reason I did want to go home was I wanted to go back and be with the children and be with Devin. I was so afraid that if I didn't go home, I would never get home. I kept thinking my brain was never going to be right. The memories weren't coming back, and I didn't think I'd ever get home.

So it seems like that everyone from your doctors to your family thought that you just needed time for the memories to return. So you were not admitting that you didn't have those memories. You had to keep that a secret from them.

What was that part of it like? That you, I guess, were cognizant that you were keeping a secret? I was keeping a secret from everyone, even from Deb.

Deb didn't know the extent. He knew that I wasn't as sharp as I had been. He knew that I made several big mistakes in front of him in the hospital with friends. I would parrot in the hospital. The way I got out of the hospital and the way they thought memories were coming back is when people would come to visit me in the hospital, he would say the person's name that came in the room, and I would parrot that name. So he would say, Hi, Jane. And I would say, Hi, Jane.

Thank you for coming. I would parrot whatever Deb said. And then I would listen for cues that he said, and I would follow that.

So that's how we did it. And that's how I made them think I was getting better. The problem was when I got out of the hospital, it wasn't as easy, and it took its toll on me. And that was when I began to fall underneath it, and I began to get really frustrated with myself.

We have to also say that for those who are younger listening and you wonder if she gets lost, just pull out your phone and ask it. You didn't have a phone that you could ask in these days. It was before the explosion of the internet and everything that was going on there. No, I had nothing. I lived literally a stone's throw from the Harris Teeter, which was the grocery store. I lived a stone's throw from the grocery store, but one time it took me nearly 30 minutes to get home because I took a wrong turn and I got lost with all three kids in the car.

It was very frustrating. And since then, I've found out more times that other people knew that I got lost. My babysitter knew that I got lost several times because it took me a long time to get home, and she's admitted to me that she knew I got lost. So I think other people probably knew, but were kind and probably didn't admit to me that they knew.

Yeah, yeah. So in living your daily life, now you're saying you went to the store, you got lost, but how did you function with the aspects of life in a family? Well, at the beginning, it was easier than it was as time went on. Because in the beginning, I had my mother here. She came and she helped. And there was a nurse here initially when I came home to help. And there was also our babysitter named Christine.

We called her Teenie. And she was here, and she was wonderful. And she stayed on after mom left two days a week, and she was literally the glue which held the family together. And she would help me with taking the children places and picking the kids up from places and making sure that things were running smoothly. Had she not been here, I think my deficits would have been glaringly obvious.

But because she was here, it was hidden better than it would have been. Yeah. So your family members and her were basically kind of doing what you could not do and making sure you didn't do anything that caused greater problems.

Right. But the problem was they didn't realize what they were doing. They just thought they were helping.

They didn't realize how bad it was. Now, what did the loss of memory do to your art? Well, that's the interesting thing because I didn't remember that I had majored in art at this point. So I had no memory of art at this point. I had majored in art, but I had no memory of college at all, no memory of getting married, no memory of having children, no memory of putting my art on hold. So for me, art was nothing. There was no memory of it at all at that point. I didn't start back painting until literally 15 years from right now. So all of that was on the back burner. Yeah, yeah. Now, you were a Christian, I assume, before all of this happened.

Yes. So how did all of this then affect your relationship with God when you were going through all of this? Well, I became a Christian when I was a child.

My parent, I was raised in a Christian home and I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior when I was a little girl. But I was always the person that believed that God could run the universe and I would handle my own life. I was just that person that I was going to do it my way. But then when I got sick, it rocked my world and it really put me in a place where I was going to have to either trust Him because I couldn't do it on my own. I was at a chasm.

I couldn't do it myself, but I wasn't ready to surrender at this point. So I literally went to God every single morning and I asked Him to give me my memories back. I wanted my memories back. Every single morning I would pray to Him, please give me my memories back. Every morning it became clear day after day, week after week, month after month that they weren't going to come back, and I began to get angry at God.

I believe the core of my struggle with God was that I had this need to control and I couldn't let go and trust Him. He seemed so silent and I wanted Him to act, but I wanted Him to do it my way. I wanted Him to fix what I wanted Him to fix, but I wanted Him to do it my way.

And it wasn't happening. And I got really angry. Did you express that anger to God, Marcy?

No, well, not really. I still kept up a facade of getting up every morning, praying. I didn't tell Him I was mad at Him. I don't think I thought He could handle my anger, so I just held it all in. We were still going to church because I had been healed. God had healed me. I felt guilty for being angry. God had healed me physically and I knew He'd healed me, but I was angry that my brain was so messed up. My brain was so messed up and I was very, very angry. Then that's what happened to me next was in all the frustration, I became very, very depressed because the anger turned inward. I mean, it literally turned to depression.

How did that depression affect your behavior? Well, at that point, I remember asking a friend, I was having frustration with the kids getting homework done at night. We were trying to get homework done, and I remember asking a friend, Do you have trouble at nighttime? Is it hard with you at the kids? And she said, Yeah, but just have a glass of wine.

It'll make it so much easier. And what started off very simply as a glass of wine soon turned out to be a problem for me. And I drank for the effect and it wasn't an innocent glass of wine anymore. It became much more than that for me. And very soon I drank to forget what I couldn't remember.

Wow. Did your husband see or kids probably your husband more? Did he see what was going on or were you able to hide that from him? I hid it unbelievably. I could control my drinking.

I hid it. No one knew, but I needed the alcohol. I turned to alcohol instead of to God. Literally, it became the idol.

I see that now as clearly as day. It became the idol that I turned to, and it became what I looked to, to help me get through this horrible time. It was my source of strength. Instead of turning to God as my source of strength, I turned to alcohol. And the funny thing, when I nearly took that first drink, there was a warning. I still saw a voice that said, be careful, but I drank anyway. Did it turn into an addiction?

Absolutely. But nobody knew. Nobody knew. So how did you hide it and how did you eventually find freedom from that? I hid it by controlling my drinking so carefully. I drank when no one was watching. I did not drink in front of people.

That's how I hid it. And then in 1997, I surrendered, and it was really cool the way it happened. Because God doesn't leave you where you are.

He just doesn't. We were sitting with our family, and I had not had a drink of alcohol because that night we were sitting watching TV in December 1997. I got up because we had a greyhound that needed to go outside, so I drew the short straw to take the dog out. I took him outside, and as I was coming back up the driveway, he lunged because they're sighthounds. He saw a bunny or something. He lunged, and I fell to the ground. As I got up, I looked in our window, and there was my family, sitting where I had been sitting in our den.

They were all still watching TV. At that moment, God spoke to my heart as clearly as ever before, and He said to me, That is what I saved you for, the future, not the past. As much as that father loves his children, I love you more. Just as that father has that daughter in his arms, I'm holding you, and I will never let you fall.

But you have to trust Me. That night, I went to the backyard, and I fell to my knees. I surrendered my life for the first time, and I gave up alcohol. I knew at that moment that it was better to have His plan without my memories than my plan with memories.

I trusted His love for me for the first time. Can I stop here, Gary, and just ask Marcy, if there's somebody listening who has been caught in that addiction, it could be alcohol, it could be opioids, whatever it is, and they are hearing your story, and they're saying, I'm glad that you found that freedom. I can't find it. It's never going to be mine.

What do you say to that person? Oh, but it can. It can. The story is not over. God can absolutely deliver you. All you have to do is surrender and ask Him to relieve you of the compulsion.

He will deliver. Now, after I did that in the backyard, I will tell you that I went to a 12-step program every single day for days, weeks, months, years. I followed up, and I was diligent because I knew that I had an addiction. I had an allergy to a substance that was literally going to kill me if I kept pursuing it. But the truth is, He will deliver you.

And to this day, I have been away from it for 24 years. Thanks for joining us today for Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. Find us online at FiveLoveLanguages.com. We have some great resources, a tool to assess your love language. You can hear a podcast of the program and find out about our featured resource. It's the book by Marcy Gregg titled Blank Canvas, the amazing story of a woman who awoke from a coma to a life she couldn't remember.

Click Resources, then Building Relationships when you go to FiveLoveLanguages.com. Marcy, before the break, we were talking about the time that you really acknowledged before God that you needed His help and that you were depending upon alcohol rather than Him. You began that journey, and God changed your heart that night. Then you followed up on that with the 12-Step Program, which, as we all know, refers people to what is called a higher power. But for us, we know that is God who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. So when you surrendered everything to God, did you then tell your family what you had been doing?

Yes. I've sat everybody down. We told our friends. I was just honest about everything at that point because honesty had been the problem all along, and I began to just tell the truth. Did you do it that night, or was it a few days or weeks later? It wasn't that night.

It was a few days later. Up until that point, you still did not remember all those things between the time you were 17 and present, or were some of them beginning to come back? No, they never came back, Gary. None of them ever came back. I never retrieved any of the memories, not college, getting married, having our children, moving to Charlotte. Those things were gone, and they just never came back. So even until this day, you don't remember those things?

No, I don't. And sometimes that's hard. But really, God has filled me with so many wonderful new memories that I'm good.

Yeah, yeah. Now, when you surrendered to God and you shared with your family the fact that you were addicted to alcohol, and you shared with your friends, and you began that journey out of that, you began at some juncture then to rediscover your passion and your talent for painting. Well, one day I had literally this burning desire to paint. I mean, literally, I woke up and I said, I want to paint. And I said, I need to take lessons. And my husband started laughing. He said, you majored in art in college. Why do you need to take lessons?

And I said, but I don't remember that. And he said, well, if you want to take lessons, take lessons, but I think you're going to remember that you did this. So I did start back painting, and it was like a fire was lit within me. And I began to paint daily, and it just flowed. I could not get enough, and our house began to fill up with canvases.

I got a studio outside of the house, and the rest is history. I just couldn't stop. But you still didn't remember that you majored in? No, I don't remember any of it.

Isn't that funny? I don't remember any of it. You just believed your husband that you did. I believed him with a lot of things. So now, you mentioned wanting to take lessons. Did you actually take lessons, or did you just start painting and it just came?

I took from a wonderful man here in Charlotte, Andy Braitman. And I was an artist-in-residence with him, and learned so much from him. So it was really a special season of my life. And it was great. It really was.

I paint every day. Now, in terms of your children, because they were young when this happened originally to you, since that time, you went home. There were your children. You had to relate to them. You have memories from that time on. Am I understanding that right?

Yes. I have all the memories of the children growing up, once I got home with them. Now, you also, at some juncture, experienced a knee injury that really came close to putting an end to your art career.

Tell us about that. Well, I was on my way to the studio to paint, or to my artist-in-residence program to paint. It was a week before graduating from the artist-in-residence program, and I fell down a flight of stairs in our home. And I broke my kneecap and severed the patella tendon, and it was a really bad injury.

And I was bedridden for several, well, for weeks. And it was during that time that God really taught me. He used that time to teach me more about trusting Him, even when you don't understand. And it was just a continuation of learning to trust Him.

And I think that has been the biggest lesson in my life, is learning to trust Him when I don't understand. And I remember journaling during that time when I was in bed, I journaled lessons I've learned on my back, because I laid on my back for so many days, and I would just journal things that I would learn. It was a very, very good time, a very special time. Did that crucible, then, that you went through inform your art? Did you wind up, because you journaled, you know, you kind of worked this out with words, did it come out on the canvas as well?

You know, it did. I'll tell you what it taught me. Because I was so wanting to be in the studio and painting, my husband brought me a plate of glass, and he brought me, and I said, and he got me some oil paints, and I literally would lay in the bed, and I would mix paint, and he would give me magazine pictures, and I would mix paint to try to mix colors to match colors in the pictures of the magazines. And what it did was, it literally taught me how to mix colors perfectly, so I could mix to any color that you would ever imagine. So what happened was, I became a colorist, and literally, that's where I got my love of color, was in the bed.

I never used color straight out of the tube now, I mix my colors, because I found that there was beauty in different mixing of colors. And so really good things came in those quiet moments in the bed. Yeah. But I can imagine that when you had that fall, and were put in that position, it was very difficult for you to deal with that. It had to be. Oh, it was. I mean, I remember asking why, I thought maybe God was taking it away from me, because I had made it too important in my life, because I had surrendered my life to Him, back after the alcohol, and maybe I had made art too important. I didn't know what was going on.

But it wasn't that. God just wanted me to trust Him. He wanted me to understand that He was faithful.

And He was faithful through the entire process. And I learned that through the leg. And I remember thinking, will I ever walk again? And I walk perfectly now.

It's great. He was faithful. You know, when I recently retired from the staff at our church, where I had served for 50 years, and they asked me to give a little word to the people, you know. And one of the things I shared with them is, you will not always understand the things that happen in your life. Because I think sometimes as Christians, we feel like, you know, we know God, we're walking with God, we'll understand everything that happens. I said, now some of those things, you will come to see the good that God brought out of them, which is what you just demonstrated. You know, you came to see that this whole thing of mixing colors came out of that. I said, but some of those things you'll never understand.

And I reminded them of that song. I don't remember who wrote the song, but there's that line that says, when you can't see God's hand, trust his heart. Trust his heart. You know, we know he's for us.

We surely don't see his hand and what happened. But we believe that he has our best interest in mind, and we trust him. That's a powerful lesson for all of us. Powerful.

Yes. One of the verses that you mentioned that was really meaningful to you was Philippians 4.13. How has that been such a special verse to you? Well, it was a verse that my dad used to give me.

He would always say, you know, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. He would say that verse to me over and over when I was facing anything difficult. And it was a verse that I then gave to my children. So it was a verse in our house that was used often. But then I realized, and it was a verse that I used when my leg got injured. I used that verse over and over. It was a verse that became very front and center when my leg was hurt.

But now for me, that verse has a whole different meaning. I need him in everything I do. And in fact, I say it this way, without Christ, I can't do it. I need him in everything I do.

The longer I live, the more I know this. There's no question. I can't do anything without him.

Yeah, yeah. At John 15.5, when Jesus said, I'm the vine, you're the branches. You're the branches.

You stick with me, you bear fruit. And then he said, without me, you can do nothing. You're nothing. You're nothing.

It's the opposite of the Philippians 4.13. Without him, we do nothing. With him, we can do everything that he has in mind for us. That's so good.

That's so good. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of The New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Marci Gregg is our guest today. Her book is titled Blank Canvas, the amazing story of a woman who awoke from a coma to a life she couldn't remember. You can find out more at her website, marcigreggart.com.

That's marcigregart.com. And Marci, I have to ask you, when people talk about being an artist or being a painter and that you work in oils, many people know exactly what you're talking about. They've seen your art before, but a lot of people don't.

They don't have a concept of what it is that you do. So when you walk into the studio and when you get that canvas in front of you, what are you doing there? Well, I walk into the studio every morning and you'll smell linseed oil the minute you walk in.

So there's the odor of the linseed oil and the oil paints in the studio, the turpentine. And I have big canvases. I paint very large. So my canvases are 40 inches by 40 inches, 48 by 48, some 60 by 60. So they're very large canvases. And I literally mix paint on a glass-top table and I am mixing these oil paints together. And then with brushes, I apply them to these big canvases and I do abstract painting.

So it's things that have color and line. It's all about the colors and the lines that I place on the canvas to create images that will intrigue the audience. What are you trying to do on the inside of somebody who looks at that abstract art? I want to draw you in, to make you question what I'm doing exactly. I want to draw you into the image. And usually my paintings are so large, I hope they literally make you want to go into the painting itself.

A lot of people will say they're like a puzzle. And you'll always find a circle somewhere in my painting. And that's because we are complete in Christ, so there will always be an image of a circle somewhere in the painting. And somewhere in the painting I'll always have hidden a cross. Sometimes it's seen and sometimes it's not seen, but there's always been a cross painting somewhere in the painting. I'm sitting here thinking, my son would love to see your art.

He lives in Texas, in Austin, Texas. He's not an artist himself, but he sees art in everything. And behind that art, he sees God.

He would be fascinated to see your paintings. I note that in the bottom layer of all your paintings, you put Scripture. How do you select those verses?

And why is this practice important to you? That's the really cool thing about my work. Back in 2013, I started putting Scripture as the foundation of the piece.

And what I do is I literally, in the morning when I'm spending my time with the Lord studying, I will find a Scripture that will be the verse that's going to be the verse for that day. And I will write it down in a sticky note and I will take it to the studio with me. And when I start a new painting, that verse is what I literally start right across the canvas, big and bold.

It's literally from the top of the canvas to the bottom of the canvas. So it's in big, bold letters. The whole verse is written out. And I write it out and it becomes the foundation for that painting. And it's also going to be the inspiration for the title. And then I will paint over that.

So that is the foundation for whatever I put on top of it. And usually it directs me in what the painting is going to look like. So, for example, I just painted Romans 8-28, just in a painting that was titled Every Layer Matters.

And the verse, the Scripture was Romans 8-28. And I painted out the verse all the way down. I painted this painting and it had multiple layers of paint. And then everything on the top layer said to me, it was all different shapes, different lines. And then I titled it Every Layer Matters. And that was the end of the work.

And so that's kind of what I'm known for. Some people call me the verse lady. But you don't see that. You don't see the verse as you're looking at the picture. It's underneath, right?

It's underneath. But the cool thing is, I write it on the back of the painting. So people that purchase the painting will have it on the back of the painting, so they'll know it's there. And it has started many conversations with people about the Scripture that is found underneath the work. Now, in that first layer where you write the Scripture, do you just write the reference? Or do you actually write the words? I write every word that's in there. So I write out everything that's there. So it says, literally, the whole thing.

We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose. That whole thing was written out on the canvas. Oh yeah.

Wow. That's a powerful concept. That the Scripture is the foundation for the painting. As it is in life. Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. At the end of the book, you include a prologue about another health struggle that you're having, which impacts your painting. Share with us about that. Well, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis a couple of years ago, and it has been a daily struggle. We've really had a hard time getting me in remission. Rheumatoid arthritis, for people that don't know, affects the joints, and you sometimes feel like you have the flu. And it has really affected my hands. But God has been so good and so faithful in this journey.

We're not promised that it's going to be easy, but He shows up. For instance, when I was having trouble holding onto my brushes because I couldn't grip real well, the girl that I paint with, Adrienne Redmond, she and I had painted together for years and years. She stands next to me, and for 15 years she stood in the studio with me. One day I couldn't paint, and because my hands hurt so bad, she came in the next day with tennis balls. She said, We're putting these on the ends of your brushes. Well, God literally used Adrienne to bring in the idea to put tennis balls on the ends of my brushes, because those tennis balls were the way that I could hold onto my brushes to paint. And I really believe that that was such a gift that God gave me through a very dear friend that I was able to keep painting.

So every day now, I hold my brush with a tennis ball, and that's the way I paint. So God has been so faithful. Wow.

It's amazing how God shows up and introduces things that we would never have thought about. At least I would never have thought about putting a tennis ball on. Never. Never. Ever.

Oh, that's amazing. Well, what encouragement do you have for someone who's listening, and they find themselves in what feels like an impossible situation in their own lives? What would you say to them?

Well, I would go back to the painting that I just finished, and it's going to make me cry. Romans 8, 28. For we know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

We know all things. This verse is a verse of hope. Let me say it this way. If you came to my studio today, you would see a painting that I just began a couple of days ago, and you'd probably say it isn't very good.

You'd look at it and you'd say, it isn't working. And that's because I'm not finished. Every layer is not on that painting yet.

What I'll add next will be used to make the first layers work together, creating something beautiful. But it's not done yet. And that's the way it is with our lives and with God. He's not finished making us into what he wants us to become. And we've got to trust him, even when it really doesn't feel right right now.

We've got to trust him because he's trustworthy. That's what I would say. Well, that's what we need to hear. Well, Marcy, thank you for being with us. And I thank all of those who are listening to us who may be going through things like that.

And sooner or later, almost all of us do. I think they're going to find your story and this book extremely helpful. And so thank you for what you've done with your life, even though you don't remember a whole section of your life. And thank you for what you've done in this book and for being with us today. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. And again, the title of our resource, Blank Canvas, The Amazing Story.

And you've heard it today of a woman who awoke from a coma to a life she couldn't remember. Written by Marcy Gregg, G-R-E-G-G, and her website. I hope you'll go there. I hope you'll look at the art that she has created so you can see what we've been talking about.

Marcy Gregg, G-R-E-G-G, Art.com. You can also find simple ways to strengthen relationships at our website, FiveLoveLanguages.com. And next week, your questions about relationships, the love languages and more. Our May Dear Gary comes your way in one week. Big thank you today to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Todd. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in Chicago, in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.