It is the simplest message in Christian teaching: God Is Love. It is also the most audacious scripture propagating endless conundrums — the least believable too — open to rational criticism and ridicule. The jalopy in our image belonged to Leonard Knight, folk-artist and evangelist. The vehicle doubled as his residence. He wrapped the dilapidated thing seamlessly to include even the tire walls with biblical words and symbolic images. Not welcome in church organizations, therefore unable to serve in formal ministry despite evidence of a radically changed life, Leonard dedicated his latter years to sending out Gospel messages, crudely drawn in often garish colors. His autism, foolishness and ineptitude did not matter at all, proving the saying: God’s power is made perfect in weakness. His supporters estimate 500,000 pilgrims traveled to this desolate place in California just to hear Knight’s story from his own mouth, in his own idiom, this man who styled himself an uneducated drifter, a dirt poor, dumb, shy dropout, a born-again hobo on this planet — yet while he lived he was proclaimed “the most visited man on Earth.”

And thousands continue to make the trek to Salvation Mountain even now years after Leonard’s death.

He preached — and seems to have manifested — Saint John’s first principle: God is Love. “Keep it that simple,” he told pilgrims. God loves the world He created, everything and everybody in it — you included — and made an awful sacrifice to rescue you from fear. You should love as God has loved. Love your neighbor as yourself. If you ask: “Who is my brother?” — you made a wrong turn somewhere — go back and get on the right path. You must see spiritual harvest in your life as enumerated in Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia. Much of the fruit mentioned here ripens among observable human behaviors:

But the fruit of the spirit [the result of His presence within us] is love [unselfish concern for others], joy, [inner] peace, patience [not the ability to wait, but how we act while waiting], kindness, goodness, faithfulness.

Galatians 5:22 — From the Amplified New Testament

Leonard’s art, his person, and his witness I came upon by chance.

Below take a look at an image I made standing behind Leonard Knight’s house on wheels, showing the entrance to his porch and the ingress to his private chambers in the background. The outer door takes its theme from our scripture in Galatians: