Graciela Kessler spent 20 years journaling the names of God through cancer, burnout and a calling she tried to ignore. And when I sat down with her over Zoom for this 45-minute interview, I knew before we were done that it would forever change the way I pray.
In 2006, Graciela was making a new home in Texas—Argentine-born, far from family, with two young children and a breast cancer diagnosis that gave her very little reason for hope. The tumor was aggressive, growing four centimeters in three months. What followed was a mastectomy and nine months of chemotherapy. What emerged from it was something she hadn’t expected: a revelation.
“I went to the Lord,” she says, “and I said, Lord, I need you. And He said, ‘I am the Lord who heals you’” (Exodus 15:26). Even when fear came, I held onto that. His Word never returns void. I’m going to be healed.” She was. But the deeper healing was in how she came to understand the name itself. “His name became a revelation in my heart, not just knowledge in my brain. There was the application of His name in my own life, and I saw it in a completely different way.”
That moment launched a practice. In every new season—every diagnosis, career crisis, transition—she learned to ask one question: Lord, what is the name I need to know right now? During those years of private journaling, the answers accumulated. They became, eventually, a book: Divine Tapestry: An Alphabetical Journey Through the Names, Nature, Titles, and Attributes of God.
“It taught me a process,” she says. “It starts with knowledge, moves to revelation and creates a new level of intimacy.”
Letters That Hold the Pages Together
By 2024, Graciela was a project manager overseeing eight simultaneous construction projects, working 16-hour days, six days a week. Her body was breaking down. Her spirit was quietly starving. She felt God calling her out—no plan, no backup, no new job waiting. She wrote her resignation letter anyway.
Next came an invitation to rest, something that many of us, like Graciela, don’ t truly know how to accept. God impressed these words o her heart:
“This season is not under your power. You are not driving.” So, she rested.
One Sabbath at a time. Her son, who had watched her exhaustion up close, looked at her one day and said simply, “Now you can write a book.”
She brushed it off. But an old journal surfaced. A dream came. One sleepless night, she felt God say: If I say a letter, can you think of a name? They played an alphabetical game in the dark—God prompting, Graciela finding a divine name for each letter. By morning, she had a structure. A spreadsheet. An architecture. “If you ask how long it took me,” she laughs, “If I had put it all together, it would’ve taken 18 years. He took everything that I had already walked through and the book came together in four months.”
When “I AM” is Every Answer
When I asked her which name discovery surprised her most—the one people overlook, the one that carries more than most realize—Graciela didn’t hesitate.
“I Am,” she says. “People know it; it’s what God said to Moses. (See Exodus 3:14.) But I don’t think people know the deep meaning.” She pauses. “I Am is not only I exist. I Am is: I Am who you need Me to be.”
That one declaration, she explains, encompasses every other name: Healer, Provider, Shepherd, Peace. Whatever the season demands, I Am is already that. It is the name that unlocks all names.
A Battle Between Ownership and Stewardship
Graciela spoke candidly about a cycle she has struggled with in every season. God gives a gift, you grow into it, you get good at it, and then, quietly, you stop needing Him for it. “We start removing Him from the equation,” she says. “I got this. And that starts turning into your idol. You become your own idol.”
The internal shift she embraced came not from striving harder, but from asking a different question: Am I working from ownership or stewardship? “You know you’re in the right work,” she says, “because you have peace. And you work from joy.” Then she adds the line that made me press pause on the conversation to soak it in: “It’s the difference between ownership and stewardship.”
Stewardship means the pressure of results belongs to the owner, not to you. When her publisher raised marketing strategies and budget conversations, she went back to prayer. “Lord, this is your book. I’m just an instrument. If you want it to be successful, I trust you—one step at a time.”
“You do because you became, not to become. You don’t work for God to accept you. You work because you already are His.”
Today, the name God is revealing to her is Shalom—His peace. And she admits it is harder than it sounds. “I wake up with energy and ideas. And some days He says, “Just rest.” She smiles. “We don’t allow ourselves to go through that process. But rest is not the absence of calling. Sometimes it IS the calling.”
Divine Tapestry: An Alphabetical Journey Through the Names, Nature, Titles, and Attributes of God (WestBow Press) is available wherever books are sold. You can find out more about her at gracielakessler.com
