Milk and Honey Day 2: The Vision Where It Began
Technically this collection started back in 2021…
I was two years out from my divorce and still very much still recovering. The legal part was done. The life part was not. I had three little kids, and I was rebuilding from scratch in every direction at once. The person I had once genuinely admired had become someone I didn't recognize, and then someone dangerous. The emotional and psychological abuse had escalated over time and by the end it was becoming physical. Getting out was the right call. Starting over with nothing while raising three kids alone and being physically sick from the stress of all of it is still one of the hardest things I have ever done.
So 2021 was not a settled season. It was still raw. Still uncertain. I was still asking God the same questions I had been asking since everything fell apart. What are you doing? What happens to us? What am I supposed to do next?
I was praying one night after the kids were asleep, not composed prayer, just pouring everything out, and the image came.
A wheat field. Expansive, stretching as far as the eye could see and fading into the horizon. Everything super saturated and golden and intensely bright and still. Not a dream, not a vision playing out like a film. More like a photograph dropped into my mind like a download. Immediate and clear and carrying weight I couldn't fully name yet.
And alongside the image came a rush of meaning, almost all at once, like it arrived with its own unpacking already attached. Hope, real hope, the kind that lands somewhere deep without asking permission. Provision, not just for right now and not just for me but something generational, reaching forward into my children's lives. My mind went straight to Ruth. A woman who lost everything, walked into an uncertain season with nothing but faithfulness, and gathered grain in a field that was already prepared for her before she got there.
I wrote about it. I tracked the confirmations that kept coming alongside it that week, the way God will say the same thing through multiple channels if you're paying attention. Verses in Mark. Jesus and the disciples picking wheat as they walked. A song on repeat in my head, Kelly Minter, there is wheat amongst the tare, there is comfort in desperate prayers, oh I believe. And then Ruth coming up in Bible study that same week unexpectedly with wise counseling speaking parts of her story over me unprompted.
Sitting with all of it, what I heard was specific. Not vague comfort. He is giving wheat fields of my own. Surplus provision to share in feast and famine, not just the wheat left behind amongst the tares. Not just enough to survive, enough to give. And not just for now. Until my days are done and even then the fields will continue.
Partly a reclaiming of land that had been lost. Partly recompense for what the locust ate.
I painted the field at the time to document it and kept it mostly private. It felt too specific, too tender to share. It was a promise to hold and steward, not a post to make.
I didn't know then that I would carry it for years more. That it would keep growing quietly in the background while life kept moving and not resolving the way I hoped. That the image that dropped into my head on a late night in 2021 would eventually become this, a full collection, forty days of documented process, something I'm finally ready to paint properly.
That's where this starts. Not with a plan or a concept. With a photograph of a golden field swaying gently in the breeze and a promise I wasn't ready to let go of. Recently my situation has turned to the uncertain again. And again the wheat field is growing in my mind.
More on that later. Today is for history. Of where the vision started…
January 23, 2021 (from my journal)
I started working on this piece a few days ago. I could feel it calling to my soul: a wheat field. Most of my visions are dreams or short video but this one was quieter. Still. Like a photograph.
And when has come up multiple times this week as confirmations:
verses in Mark
Jesus and the disciples picking wheat to eat along the road as they traveled
more telling than any others is the song in my head the past few days on repeat. Kelly Minter… “there is wheat amongst the tare, there is comfort in desperate prayers. Oh, I believe.”
To further these references, Ruth and Naomi came to mind picking up the wheat left behind. As I was listening to lesson 3, the Holy Spirit gave me a vision and started whispering about my fears, situations and etc. I heard this: He is giving wheat fields of my own — surplus provisions to share in feast and famine, not just the wheat left behind amongst the tares. The setting sun speaks to time. Not just now, or in this season, but until my days are done and even then the fields will continue. They will be a blessing and inheritance for my children and my children’s children, my descendants for generations.
It’s partly a reclaiming of the land that was lost, partly recompense for what the locust ate. There’s more. There’s always more. But it takes time to unfold.
