Now that we’re a few weeks into the new year, how are you feeling? Excited and motivated? Empty and flat with the mid-winter blues? Weary? Is the excitement of the new year lingering, or do you just wish winter would hurry up and turn to spring?

Life’s full of ups and downs, isn’t it? Stretches of hard work followed by seasons of weariness. Days of excitement, then of emptiness. Some of us may experience more sadness than joy, or vice versa, but for most of us, life is a complicated alternation of gladness and disappointment, fullness and emptiness.

As we prepare for a new year, we must take time to reflect on where we have been to move into where we want to go. This reflection post offers a free guide to “Prepare the Way”.

Ever feel like you hustle through the Christmas season and miss the moment? Or feel like you’re constantly behind, with never enough time, energy, or resources to fulfill all the expectations during this season? Then this post is for you.

In the Kingdom of God, the harvest represents the consummation of a process that unfolds over time. It is the result of many seasons of God’s faithful cultivation of us and our world that ripens us individually and collectively into who we were created to be.

It’s the long winter spent in silence and solitude as we face our false selves and die to them.

It’s the emergence of new dreams and visions as we awaken to our true selves within.

It’s the risk of vulnerability as we show up in the world in bud break.

It’s the giving and receiving in mutual respect for one another’s gifts to cross-pollinate and set the fruit

And it’s the stress of ripening the fruit we are called to bear in the world that finally yields a fruit worth harvesting that will make an eternal impact.

The harvest; therefore, isn’t always “out there,” as though we could somehow tangibly measure or collect into baskets the fullness of what God has done. But the harvest is often “in here,” through the overflow of who we are becoming individually and collectively as a beloved community.

So what’s reaped in the harvest?

“If you come to that season and have done the work in the growing months prior, you will likely look at the fruit and see that it is clean and happy. Now it’s just a matter of time before you can reap it.” - Dave Bos

After months of dedicated pruning, the vine undergoes a transformation, channeling its energy away from growth and towards the ripening of the right fruit. This transformative phase is known as veraison, where the once vibrant green grapes begin to shift in color, typically turning red, gray, or yellow depending on the vine's variety. The ripening process turns acidic and tart grapes sweet. However, veraison brings with it a unique form of stress for the vine.

Veraison represents a crucial point in the vine's life cycle, marked by a delicate balance between growth and ripening.

It was an unseasonably cold and windy day at the end of June when I arrived at the Harbor Pavilion jutting out to the East Bay of Lake Michigan in Elk Rapids. Several white haired women scuttled their way inside the closed pavilion for the monthly Elk Rapids Garden Club meeting where Dave would be presenting on biodynamic farming.

When I spotted him, he and his sister Elizabeth were making their way inside carrying several cardboard boxes of wine and supplies. Dave was wearing his typical navy baseball cap donned with sunglasses and a short sleeved farmer’s plaid shirt. As they made their way towards the back of the room, we worked together to lay out a charcuterie-like spread of wine from their wine garden, several books on biodynamic farming, a cow horn, small white bowls of soil prep, and handfuls of white yarrow and nettle.

We snapped a few pictures, made a few introductions, and then Dave began with his lecture with a captive audience of gardeners on the edge of their seats. And I, who cannot even count myself a gardener, was right there with them. Even though I had known Dave from the several interactions we had over the course of four years in the vineyards, I was eager to listen in to discover more.

As we talked in a vineyard, I asked my vinedresser friend, Dave, about what he thought Jesus was referring to in this passage. He reached down and grabbed the sturdy part of the vine that goes underground into the roots, his fingers inches apart from touching, “This is the vine,” he said, and then he reached up and gently wrapped his fingers around the two branches hanging on the trellis like limbs, “and these are the branches.”

The vine is the anchoring place that draws up all the nutrients and water and provides the branches with what they need to grow and to bear fruit. The vine is the life source for the rest of the plant. Christ, the rootstock, is the one in whom we find all life and sustenance to thrive and bear Kingdom fruit.

As the weather warms up, the sap begins to flow back into the branches of the vine. Life and movement are being channeled from the energy stored up in dormancy in the winter and are on the verge of explosive growth. On the verge of resurrection.

Like the vine, as we journey out of seasons of dormancy and loss into spring, we feel alive again and begin to see more clearly. The life-force of the Spirit begins to flow through us and awaken us out of a spiritual slumber. 

So much energy is stored up, ready to break through in spring. We have hard-earned lessons that we want to manifest above ground. All the hidden work in the darkness of the soil has refined us into a new creation brimming with vitality, vigor, and vision. We are ready to grow and bear fruit for the kingdom.

But according to Jesus, explosive growth begins with pruning. I know…isn’t it the worst?

As vines descend into the roots during post-harvest, vinedressers dig up the soil and replenish the vines with fertilizer. The context of descent is through shovelfuls of manure. There is no sugarcoating this.

From creation we see that what was once waste; the stinky, debased, undignified, and flat out nasty parts of life give us the nutrients we need to become the thriving new creation we were meant to be.

Lent is a time where we re-orient ourselves around the death and resurrection of Christ. A time of transition where we descend from the life of Christ into the death of Christ. We begin this journey with Ash Wednesday as we remember the dust from which we were made and the ground to which we are returning. And we end the journey as we pass through the death of Christ, sit with him in the tomb, and wait for resurrection.

We see this transition all over the created order, but one of the greatest parallels is in the transition from the fall harvest to winter dormancy.

What do we learn from Wonder Woman about mixed gender partnerships?

Like Luke, I am in awe that I get to tell the story through you.

May you go forth and multiply - inviting thousands to know your Source.

May your words and images create a contemplative beholding of the Son.

May they find themselves in the story, and may His word become flesh in them.

As it became flesh in me through you.

We have been on a journey chasing after and learning about beauty this last month. I hope your soul has been awakened to beauty in a profound way. I know mine has! Thank you for joining me along the journey!

God has been leading me on this journey of chasing beauty for the last two years in order to understand it, perceive it, and create it.

I thought it might serve you to let you in on what books have most deeply shaped my view of beauty the last couple years. May these five truths, quotes and books bless and encourage you as you continue to chase beauty in your own life! I hope they awaken your soul to beauty as they did mine.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's famously said, “beauty will save the world.”

But is it true? How can beauty save us?

Let’s look together at two primary examples of God’s response to suffering in the world to find out.

Can beauty really heal trauma?

Is there neurological merit to the way beauty impacts soul?

And how might an encounter beauty liberate you?

We dive into these questions as I share how a retreat called Beauty & the Formation of the Soul with Dr. Curt Thompson liberated me and sent me on a three year journey of creativity.

What happens within us when we experience beauty? How can walking a labyrinth aid us in the process?

What happens within us when we cross thresholds in life? And how can we begin to walk on water?

“Rest isn’t something Jesus gives us, separate from himself. Rest is what comes as we learn to live our true size in Jesus’ love: small and fragile and (rightly) dependent, and cherished and made great in his love.

“Come to me, all you weary and burdened ones, and I will rest you. . .”

It’s a permanent offer, and one without condemnation. No fear of our humanness. No shame or embarrassment or impatience with our need to rest. Just invitation. “Come. I will rest you.” Those days apart I tasted the real world, the world of welcome and invitation and the love that invites us into rest….”

Maybe like me, you see 2022 as a fresh start. After a relentless couple years of change and grief, are you a little more hopeful for this new year? Maybe?

But how do we start? As the famous saying goes, “Over and over, we begin again.”

But how do you begin again? With intention and a learner’s posture. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve come up with 5 questions I hope that will help us “begin again” with intentionality in 2022.

When we sit in the wake of loss, death, and despair - could God form something new? How can we participate with him in the new creation He is making? And how can little things like snow families and play dough pave the way?