Stones that remember: Espiritu Santo

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Not long after we arrived to serve First United Methodist Church in Victoria, the world closed in with the pandemic. Like everyone else, we learned the rhythms of staying put—waiting, watching, hoping that what felt temporary would eventually pass. Months turned into a year, and though we lived in South Texas, we had hardly come to know our new home.

So on a cool day in the fall of 2020, Cindy and I decided to drive to Mission Espíritu Santo de Zuniga—a place that had stood long before our present uncertainties, long before our divisions, even before the idea of a country we call home. 

The walls of the mission hold more than architecture. They carry memory—of faith lived out with courage and conviction, and also of suffering that cannot be separated from the story. There is beauty there, but it is not simple. It is layered, like the stone itself.

As I painted this piece, I found myself returning to that day. Not just the image of the building, but the feeling of it—the quiet of the grounds, the weight of history, the strange grace of stepping outside after a long season of confinement. We drove across the road toward Presidio La Bahía, though it was closed that day. Even so, it stood as a reminder that faith and history are never isolated. They are always woven together with the broader human story.

We drove through Goliad afterward, not because we had a destination, but because we didn’t. There was something freeing about that—simply being present in a place we had not yet known.

Some ground becomes sacred through generations of worship.

Some through sacrifice.

Some through the quiet act of showing up—of walking, noticing, remembering.

This place holds all three.

And for us, it became sacred not only because of what happened there long ago, but because of when we arrived—at a moment when the world felt uncertain, and we needed to be reminded that faith has always endured in uncertain places.