Milk and Honey Day 33: Where Gold Grows

This painting is called Where Gold Grows.

Of all the pieces in the Milk and Honey collection, this one sits closest to the image that started everything. I have been carrying the idea of a golden wheat field for years, long before this became a public project and long before I had the visual language for the rest of the collection. The bees, rivers, vineyards, lemons, waterfalls, and honeycomb all came later. The field came first.

That is part of why this piece matters to me.

I did not want it to feel like a literal field or a neat illustration of a Bible verse. I wanted it to hold the feeling of the original image: wide, luminous, saturated with light, and full of the sense that something had been planted long before it could be harvested. The wheat in the foreground is still standing. The flowers are growing wild through it. The honeycomb sits in the upper corner like a hidden structure, with honey dripping into the landscape as if sweetness is beginning to break through from somewhere just beyond what we can see.

The title came after I stopped trying to make the piece carry the entire collection on its back.

At first I thought this painting might be called A Land of Milk and Honey, but that felt too broad. It sounded more like this piece WAS the collection rather than the name of this specific piece. This painting needed something smaller, something closer to the actual ground and dirt that things grow out of. Where Gold Grows felt right because the gold is not simply sitting there waiting to be found. It is growing.

That distinction matters to me.

A field is not a treasure chest. It does not produce because someone wishes it would. It has to be planted, tended, watered, watched, and given time. That is one of the reasons wheat has carried so much weight for me throughout this collection. It holds the promise of provision, but it also carries the reality of work, patience, stewardship, and future harvest. There is abundance in it, but it is not cheap abundance. It is the kind that asks you to participate.

I think that is why this painting feels less like arrival and more like evidence.

It does not say everything is finished. It does not pretend the full harvest is already gathered. It feels more like the moment when you can finally see enough growth to believe something real has been happening all along. The field is still alive. The light is still moving across it. The path still leads forward. There is gold here, but it is the kind that grows slowly through faithfulness, not the kind someone stumbles over by accident.

That is the part I hope collectors feel in this piece.

Maybe it speaks to someone who is building something that still feels unfinished. Maybe it belongs with someone who has been praying, working, waiting, rebuilding, or quietly tending something important without knowing exactly when the harvest will come. Maybe it simply becomes a beautiful reminder in a home that the best things are often cultivated over time.

I do not need someone to know the entire story of the vision to connect with this painting. The story is there if they want it, but the piece also stands on its own as a landscape filled with light, movement, sweetness, and growth. It is a wheat field, but it is also a place where hope has taken root.

For me, Where Gold Grows is one of the clearest expressions of Milk and Honey.

It holds the promise without rushing the harvest.