About Psalmlog

How Psalmlog started

Even as a child, I was captivated by the countless ways to express inner thoughts and feelings. I've been an artist my entire life, moving between music, painting, photography, filmmaking, poetry, woodworking, and numerous other creative pursuits. Throughout high school and college, I was an avid songwriter and performer, often writing about the challenges of my youth: searching for meaning, broken relationships, and more.

Though raised in a Christian home, it wasn't until age 23 that I truly gave my life to Christ at a Men's Conference in Irvine, CA, hosted by Calvary Chapel at the now-defunct Irvine Amphitheatre. Since that September in 2010, I've kept looking for new ways to use my artistic abilities to glorify God.

I wrote many Christian-themed songs (more exploratory than traditional worship) to better understand my relationship with God and process scripture. While these expressions were valuable, it wasn't until 2019 that God revealed a completely different purpose for my creative skills.

In February 2019, I lost my older brother, Colin. Though I had experienced the loss of older relatives before, losing my sibling drove me to search deeper and ask God difficult questions. Suddenly, grief in scripture leaped from the pages with newfound clarity. I realized how much of Scripture either depicts grief or was written by someone experiencing it.

Following my brother's death, I committed to painting every day for a year to process my grief, sharing the experience on social media. These paintings were often accompanied by Bible verses that reflected my thoughts or artistic expression that day.

That year of paintings became the foundation for a documentary titled "The Art of Grieving." It has now been viewed in over 40 countries by tens of thousands of people, many of them working through a loss of their own.

Though not featured in the documentary, I became fascinated with tools that allowed me to analyze shifts in color throughout the year. Grief holds a whole spectrum of emotions, often at once, but one usually dominates at any given moment.

Since releasing the documentary in 2022, I've explored my faith and my relationship with God more deeply, mostly through reflective journaling. Yet I've always been frustrated by the lack of an easier way to journal and understand changes in sentiment or prayer topics over time.

The tools finally exist to do this. Talking is faster than paper, and large language models can put what you wrote next to what Scripture says about it. They're just tools. Psalmlog will use them to help believers (and seekers) keep bringing their lives to God's Word.

Preston Zeller, Founder of Psalmlog