This essay was written by Paige Winegar Fetzer, winner of the Creative Nonfiction section of the 2026 Humanities Center Tell Your Story Contest.
Most of what I know about God has arrived sideways—caught like dust motes illuminated in a warm slant of light. The summer before I started graduate school, the sun slipped through the window of our basement apartment that way.
Angled, tangled in the shadows of lawn grass, it tracked across the tile floor, speckling boxes and our mismatched furniture as we moved into the tiny set of rooms. While my husband made a grocery run, I settled tiredly against a mountain of sharpie-labeled cardboard. I couldn’t bring myself to unpack anything.
I’d been accepted to a master’s program in creative writing at BYU, and though I’d worked hard for the opportunity, I was struggling to feel excited about anything. This was the most recent in a long string of moves—the latest deviation from my original plan of homes and babies and career paths.
I was grateful for the strange gift of divine subversion, but longed for the solidity of knowing. I hadn’t written anything in months.
Everything was so quiet.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, wrinkling my nose at the musty smell. Dusk darkened the apartment, but I didn’t stand to turn on the lights. I was waiting for the flare—what Spencer W. Kimball might have called “the spectacular” spiritual message.
I plead, for what felt like the millionth time, just tell me I’m moving in the right direction.
I fell asleep waiting for the heavens to part.
—
I began my college career as a psychology major at Utah State University. This was, as everything had been, according to the long-established plan I’d made for myself.
Stretched ahead of me were the four predictable years of a Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in studio art. Beyond them loomed graduate school, and a stable career as a pediatric art therapist. I could also see the husband and children interspersed, though, at the time, they still seemed peripheral. A part of the long game.
It was a good plan, and I’d repeated it to myself and anyone else who asked for long enough that deviation seemed inconceivable.
But after a semester of statistics labs and lectures about behavioral studies, I found myself strangely hollowed out. One day, as I braced against the Northern Utah windchill of my morning walk to campus, I felt a strange panic build in my chest.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do anymore.
When a plan collapses, the future suddenly grows quiet. Without the familiar script to follow, even small decisions take on an unfamiliar weight. I didn’t yet know what direction my life would take, but I knew I needed to move toward something that felt alive. So I began choosing classes not for where they would lead, but simply because they stirred a faint spark of curiosity.
In a quiet act of surrender, I signed up the next semester for a handful of classes that simply
sounded interesting. One of them was poetry.
On the first day, my professor asked us to spend ten minutes describing something ordinary. “Look until it becomes unfamiliar,” he said. I chose the cracked sidewalk outside the building. At first there was nothing to write—just gray cement, a few pebbles caught in the seams. But as I sat there longer, details began to emerge. The concrete was not gray but a scatter of colors: chalk-white grains, flecks of rust, tiny glints of quartz catching the light. A line of ants threaded carefully along the fracture in the pavement, disappearing and reappearing like a stitched seam.
I realized I had walked over that same sidewalk dozens of times without ever seeing it.
Poetry required that kind of looking. Each week we practiced it: describing a kitchen sink, a bus stop, the particular shade of evening light in a hallway. The work felt almost physical, like adjusting a lens. The familiar world shifted slightly out of alignment until its textures surfaced—the way a leaf curls along its veins, the way light pools on a windowsill, the way a voice falters just before someone says something honest.
Slowly, I began to understand that attention changes what we perceive. When we linger with something long enough, it begins to disclose itself. The ordinary world grows intricate, even radiant, under sustained looking.
Poetry didn’t alter the world around me so much as it altered the way I moved through it. Looking differently, I discovered, was the first step toward really seeing.
This relies on attention to revelation—on the hands of a second, less visible Artist, animating our work with light. In this divine collaboration, inspiration is everywhere—the world gone luminous because we see it with new eyes. As Mary Oliver writes in “Sometimes,”
“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
A few weeks into that class, a visiting poet from Brigham Young University came to speak to us about their Master of Fine Arts program. She described the students there—writers who had chosen to spend their days reading carefully, writing deliberately, and paying close attention to the world around them. They believed poetry mattered, she said, because attention matters; that by noticing the overlooked details of ordinary life, a poem could change the way someone saw the world. I remember sitting in that classroom with the strange certainty that I needed to be there. I wanted to study with people who believed that kind of attention could make the world better—that learning to see clearly was its own form of service.
I wanted to give my life over to the surprise of poetry—to the need to share the world, renewed,
with itself.
Writing taught me to slow down and to notice its small, flickering details—the worn corner of a book, the pattern of sunlight on a wall, the fleeting hesitation in a student’s voice—and to celebrate them, not merely record them. Writing became a way of attending. But when the
certainty of guidance and clear answers had slipped away, my attention wavered. The light I had once traced through words and observation felt hidden behind shadows of doubt and expectation.
Attentiveness is not just an aesthetic or intellectual exercise—it is a discipline of faith, a way of keeping God’s light in view even when the world seems opaque. By extension, it becomes an act of creation—a partnership with the unseen Artist.
We clumsily dance our fingers through practice, looking for beauty in the mess we make, and Heavenly Father teaches us how to see it.
The ordinary, once truly seen, is no longer ordinary.
—
I woke the next morning to a strip of light like white linen over my eyes. I blinked, bringing the room into focus. My husband was already gone, his side of the bed empty of everything but the wrinkled sheet we’d haphazardly thrown over ourselves the night before. I heard a noise outside and looked up just in time to see his tennis shoes disappear beyond the window.
As I looked closer, I realized that the overgrowth of garden plants had been cut away, making more room for the morning sun to stream in. I felt my heart in my throat. He’d gotten up early to make sure that when I did, I would wake up to light.
Revelation, art, human care—they converge. They shape perception. We take what little light we are given and, as artists and as disciples, we amplify it.
I didn’t have all, or even many, of the answers to my questions, and my life was still grounded in a place as unfamiliar as my future, but the basement, the boxes—although ordinary, were transformed.
The way forward is not often found in a sudden unveiling of the whole road, but in the practice of attending to what is directly before us. It is trusting that each small beam of light—each gesture of care, each word written, each note played—will be enough to take the next step.
I rose slowly, the gentle heat drawing a flush from my skin—the moment lit from a new angle. Light, in all its uncommon guises, is the Lord’s way of teaching us to look again, and look differently.
Much like learning an instrument, this kind of faith requires practice.
So, I moved toward the brightest point. The tile cooled my feet as I walked toward the window, weightless particles weaving around me, gone golden in the light—the regular made radiant—the way forward made clear.
