Loss for Gain

This one is interesting. I came up with idea after reading in Philippians back in December. I doodled two different ideas trying to get the idea of how decreasing self would increase spiritual rewards and intimacy. The problem is that they were too complicated. So I shelved it. Then, nearly two months later, just out of nowhere, I got this idea. It's not quite the depiction of a gradual process, like sand coming out, it's more direct: Drop the suitcases or you can't climb. (You can see one more idea in the scratched out part on the right images: Climbing a hill with a big burden of self, but the burden is leaking sand. Still too hard to tell what's going on.) I'm still really struggling with color and backgrounds, so the final drawing ended up being much more simple that some iterations (I had one with an industrial city-scape in the background). But it gets the idea across, and that's the important part. Also, the top is highly paraphrased from a sermon that was preached at my church. You can see from the left picture below that it's even more paraphrased now that it was when I first jotted it down, mainly for space reasons. 

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