Milk and Honey: Why Create Beauty in the Wilderness?

I've been thinking about the tabernacle lately. Not because it's directly connected to anything I'm painting, but because of where it was built.

The Israelites didn't build it in the Promised Land. They built it in the wilderness.

I've always found that interesting. God didn't wait until everything was settled, comfortable, and resolved before asking artists to create something beautiful. In fact, the first person in Scripture specifically described as being filled with the Spirit of God wasn't a king, prophet, or warrior. It was Bezalel, an artist commissioned to help build the tabernacle.

That detail feels significant.

God's people were still following the cloud, still gathering manna, and still learning what it meant to trust Him one day at a time. There were practical problems everywhere you looked, yet God still made space for beauty, craftsmanship, creativity, and the work of artists. The beauty came before the destination.

In many ways, that's what this entire Milk and Honey project has been about from the beginning. The collection was never meant to be about arrival. It was inspired by the journey: the cloud by day and the fire by night, the manna that appeared one day at a time, and the long stretch between receiving a promise and seeing it fulfilled.

That hasn't changed.

When I started this project, life felt relatively calm. Not resolved, but calm. There was enough breathing room to focus on the work, document the process, and spend my days painting symbols of provision, abundance, and hope. A few weeks later, life looks a little different. My own health issues have ramped up and the project has slowed down because of it.

And honestly, that's okay. Not because it's pleasant or convenient, but because it doesn't actually change what the collection is about. If anything, it reinforces it.

Most of us have some version of this story. We set out with a plan, a vision, or a promise we're holding onto, and somewhere along the way life gets complicated. The path becomes harder than we expected. The timeline stretches. Progress slows.

What has struck me over the last few weeks is that the paintings themselves haven't changed. The wheat still speaks of provision. The rivers still speak of God's leading. The bees still remind me that meaningful things are often built through small acts of faithfulness repeated over time. The grapes still point back to abiding.

The symbols haven't taken on new meanings. They've simply become more personal.

I find myself needing the very reminders I thought I was creating for someone else.

It's one thing to paint reminders of hope, provision, and faithfulness when you're thinking about them conceptually. It's another thing entirely when life starts asking you to lean on those same truths yourself.

Maybe that's why I keep coming back to the tabernacle.

The Israelites were still following the cloud. They were still gathering manna every morning. They were still living in the tension between what had been promised and what they could actually see. If anyone had an excuse to focus only on survival, it was them. Yet God still asked artists to create beauty.

Not after they arrived.

During the journey.

Not after the wilderness.

In the middle of it.

Our culture often treats beauty as optional, something decorative that belongs on the edges of life once the important things are taken care of. But Scripture seems to place it somewhere else entirely. Right in the middle of uncertainty. Right in the middle of dependence. Right in the middle of the waiting.

Maybe that's because beauty isn't escapism.

The paintings aren't helping me escape reality. If anything, they're helping me pay closer attention to it. They're helping me notice the provision that's already here, the small evidences of grace that are easy to overlook when life gets loud, and the reminders of God's faithfulness that have been woven through the story all along.

I've often said that beauty is a form of rebellion, though perhaps resistance is a better word. Not rebellion against God, but against a culture that trains us to focus on scarcity, fear, cynicism, and everything that appears to be missing; that turns suffering and destruction into an idol. Creating beauty in a wilderness season is a quiet refusal to let those things have the final word.

It's choosing to pay attention to God's faithfulness instead of my fears. It's choosing hope over despair, faith over fear, and trust over the constant pressure to believe that what I can see right now is the whole story.

The wilderness is real. The struggle is real. But neither one gets the final word.

That's what Milk and Honey has been from the beginning. Not a collection about arrival, but a collection about learning to travel well, paying attention to the manna in the meantime, and recognizing glimpses of the promise before the promise is fully realized.

The past few weeks haven't changed that message.

If anything, they've reminded me why it mattered enough to paint in the first place.