The I AM Cover Story

The I AM Cover Story

Even before I had completed my first book, I already knew what I wanted on the cover. I had seen a deep space image captured by the Hubble Telescope, and it utterly mesmerized me. It all happened one day when I walked into the salon where I get my hair cut; there it was, this incredible image hanging on the wall behind the counter. My hairdresser told me that she had seen it on the internet and thought it was amazing, so she printed it out and hung it in her shop. I later learned that, for obvious reasons, this image was called “The Eye of God.”

During the creation of this book, I had many extraordinary experiences and frequent inspirational dreams. This was all during the Spiritual awakening phase of my life, and it was all very new and very strange to me. I had yet another dream one night and an extremely vivid dream at that. I dreamt that I was in a mall walking past a book store window, and there it was...my book, I AM, with “The Eye of God” on the cover. From that day forward I just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that I had somehow seen a glimpse of the future and had virtually seen my book in that store window.

I immediately informed my publisher that this was, without a doubt, the image that I wanted for the cover. She then proceeded to enlighten me to the simple fact that there was absolutely no way possible that we could ever use a NASA image. She explained that due to numerous copyright issues we would definitely have to find something else. She reassured me that we could easily find another spectacular space image — perhaps something that I would like even better.

As the months passed during the editing and graphics phases of production, I was regularly tormented by the fact that I couldn’t have the photo that I felt so strongly about. My graphic designer had found several very interesting deep space images, and I had almost settled on one when I had yet another dream about it. After that, I didn’t understand how, but I just knew, somehow, I was going to have that cover image. Somehow, someway, it was going to happen; I was just absolutely certain!

The next day I called my cover designer, told her of my apprehension and she, in desperation, finally agreed to allow me to access their image library. She said that I could take a look for myself to see if I could find something else that I liked. I looked for quite a while and suddenly felt this feeling come over me, this huge prompting to do a search for that particular NASA image. Even though I was told that I absolutely could not use it, I trusted that big feeling and looked anyway. After searching under every topic that I could think of, I was all but ready to give up, and suddenly, I had an overwhelming hunch to try one last thing. I instantly remembered something, that image was also called the Helix Nebula. I immediately changed my search word to Nebula and bam, I had an instant hit. There it was, the Eye of God in all its glory… and the rest is history!

Learning to listen to the promptings of God has been, by far, the greatest miracle of my life. I am finally at a place where I’m okay with not leading all the time, because all I managed to do on my own was repeatedly get lost. Let’s face it, none of us has the first clue where we are going, but He certainly seems to know. I’m sick of being lost. I’d much rather follow His lead and finally get somewhere, than to do it all on my own and stay lost.