Milk and Honey Day 26: When Bitterness Turns Sweet

Today I finished another painting in the Milk and Honey collection.

Its title is When Bitterness Turns Sweet, and in many ways it feels like one of the most personal pieces in the collection so far.

“When Bitterness Turns Sweet” BekHarris Art 2026

The painting began, as many of these pieces do, with a symbol. In this case, it was a lemon tree. I’ll be honest, while I loved the concept, it wasn’t my favorite of this batch when I first started painting it. I think I struggled with this one more than any of the others. I kept reworking it in my head and I struggled to pull the colors and composition together. But as I sat through one doctor visit after another this week, I kept coming back to the idea of ‘bittersweet.’ And when I sat to paint today, this one wanted to be finished first. And I absolutely LOVE it now.

At first glance, lemons feel a little out of place in a collection built around wheat fields, honey, rivers, and themes of provision. They don't carry the same immediate sense of abundance. No one sees a lemon and thinks of sweetness. If anything, they're known for exactly the opposite.

But that's precisely why it speaks to me.

One of the things I've noticed throughout life is that some of the best things rarely arrive in the form we would have chosen for ourselves. We pray for ease and receive growth. We ask for certainty and receive faith. We hope for quick solutions and find ourselves walking through a process instead.

The more I look at Scripture, the more I notice how often God works that way. The wilderness comes before the Promised Land. Waiting comes before fulfillment. Seeds disappear into the ground long before they become a harvest.

A lemon on its own is sharp, acidic, and difficult to enjoy. Yet with a little effort, a little processing, and a little sweetness, it becomes one of my favorite desserts. Nothing about its nature has changed. The lemon remains bright, tangy, and unmistakably itself. The transformation comes through what is added, how it is used, and what it eventually becomes.

That idea kept following me while I worked on this painting.

Not because every difficult circumstance suddenly becomes pleasant, but because God has a remarkable way of redeeming things that initially feel disappointing, painful, unfair, or unwanted. The story of faith is filled with examples of Him taking what seemed bitter in the moment and weaving it into something beautiful later. That doesn't mean the bitterness wasn't real or didn’t leave a sour taste in your mouth. It simply means it wasn't the end of the story.

As I painted, I found myself thinking about how often growth happens in exactly that space. Not in the moments we would have chosen, but in the moments we would have gladly skipped. The experiences that shape us most deeply are rarely the ones that felt comfortable while we were living through them.

Perhaps that's why lemons felt at home in this collection after all.

Milk and Honey has always been about more than provision. It has been about restoration, stewardship, faithfulness, and the long journey between receiving a promise and learning to live inside it. Every painting explores that journey from a slightly different angle.

This one explores the possibility that some things become sweet not because they started that way, but because God was not finished with them yet.

The painting is called When Bitterness Turns Sweet, and yesterday, I shared the poem that emerged alongside it, The Lemon Tree. If you missed it, please check it out!

Like much of this collection, the painting isn't really about lemons.

It's about hope.

It's about trusting that God is still working when the story feels unfinished.

It's about believing that what feels bitter today may eventually become part of something beautiful tomorrow.