There’s an old fable, told across the bazaars and courts of the East long before it reached a Word document- about a delegation of flies who once came to the King of Moths.

“We fly as you fly,” they said. “We roam the earth, restless as you are. Why should moths carry such a noble name, and we be dismissed as something lesser? Let us be counted among you.”

The king considered them. “Very well,” he said. “A moth has one calling: to seek the light. Go and do that. When you return, we’ll see.”

So, they went into towns, villages, cities and found every kind of light there was: candlelight in kitchen windows, lamplight over market stalls, the high orange flare of funeral pyres. And they came back triumphant, ready to report everything they had seen.

The king was waiting, but he was no longer deciding. “The decision was made the moment you walked back in,” he told them. “A moth that finds the light does not return to tell of it. It is consumed by it. You came back. That is your answer.”

Those who find the light do not come back to describe it. They are changed by it, or they never truly found it.

It’s a hard story to sit with, especially over coffee before a workday. Most of us are professionals precisely because we’re good at going out, gathering what we find, and bringing back a clear, well-organized report. That’s not a flaw; it’s often the job. But the fable draws a sharper line than “do good work.” It asks what we do the moment we actually encounter something true: a piece of knowledge that indicts us, an injustice we can no longer un-see, a conviction that costs something to hold. Do we let it cost us? Or do we file it, present it well, collect the credit for having found it, and go back to how we were living before?

John 12:24–26

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, and anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be.”

Jesus doesn’t describe the seed’s death as a tragedy averted by good management. He describes it as the only way anything real gets produced. The flies loved their lives too well to lose them in the light they found and so they stayed exactly what they were, single seeds, unmultiplied. The moths lost everything and, in the fable’s strange economy, that loss is the only fruitful ending in the story.

As a curious and I felt that maybe you could ask yourself these questions -

· Try noticing today where you’re tempted to report on a truth rather than let it change how you act, a policy you know is unfair, a number you know is wrong, a conversation you’ve been avoiding.

· Ask whether your ambition this season is oriented toward being seen finding the light, or toward actually being near it, cost and all.

· Remember that Christ’s own pattern was the seed, not the delegation. He did not send a report of the cross back from a safe distance.

So, here’s the question worth carrying into your first meeting: when you find something true today about your work, your team, yourself will you let it consume the version of you that walked in this morning? Or will you just bring back a very good account of it?

Lord, make us moths and not flies willing to be lost in what we find, not merely proud to have found it. -Jonathan the Wayfarer

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There is a saying I came across years ago, long before Syria, long before the dust of this city settled into my lungs and my prayers: “A man may read a thousand books and call himself a scholar, may cross a thousand miles and call himself a traveler, or preach a score of sermons from the pulpit but in real never a preacher, until he crosses the one inch between his mind and his heart, he remains a stranger to himself”.

I did not understand it then. I thought it was clever- the kind of line you nod at over coffee and forget by evening. It took years of suitcases, and a particular Tuesday in Damascus, before it found its way from my mind into that one stubborn inch.

 I had just finished reading through Paul's letter to the Ephesians for what must have been the fortieth time in my life. I could recite the structure. I could tell you where grace appears, where the household codes begin, where the armor of God is described. I knew the book the way a man knows the road from his house to his office- every turn anticipated, every pothole memorized.

And yet that Tuesday, sitting in our flat in Mazzeh with the evening call to prayer drifting in through the window, one verse simply stopped me, as if I had never read it before:

 “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” -Ephesians 2:8

 I had taught this verse. I had quoted it to colleagues weary from compassion fatigue to staff convinced their worth was measured in completed distributions and signed-off reports. I had used it as a scholar uses a citation correctly, confidently, from a safe distance.

 But that evening, for reasons I cannot fully account for, the words walked the inch. They moved from where I kept my doctrine to where I keep my fear, the quiet, unspoken fear that I am only as good as my last useful contribution. That my worth to God, to my wife, even to myself, is something I earn in increments, the way you earn frequent flyer miles or institutional trust.

Not your own doing. I had read that phrase a thousand times. I had never let it touch the part of me that, even now, after two decades of marriage and two sons and a life poured out across crisis zones from Mosul to this very city, still quietly believes that grace is a transaction I haven't quite finished paying for.

This, I think, is the peculiar danger of a long-traveled faith. We can become scholars of our own scripture, travelers across the well-worn roads of our own testimony, and still be strangers to the thing itself. We can know the doctrine of grace better than we have ever felt the weight of it land. We can travel to the hardest places on earth in Christ's name and still keep our own hearts at arm's length from the very mercy we hand out to others.

The Pharisees Jesus confronted were not stupid men. They were scholars extraordinary ones. They had traveled the breadth of the Law a thousand times over. What Christ named in them was not ignorance, but distance: the inch uncrossed between the mind that knew the commandments and the heart that had never let love nearby.

To follow Christ, then, is not finally a matter of accumulating more verses memorised, more mission fields walked, more sermons absorbed. It is a matter of crossing. Of letting what the mind has gathered finally arrive in the heart, where it can do its slow, dismantling, healing work.

I am, by now, something of a traveler. I have collected enough scripture to be called, charitably, a scholar. But the truer question -the one Damascus keeps asking me, evening after evening is whether I am still a stranger to the grace I claim to live by, or whether, inch by inch, I am finally letting it walk home.

Jonathan spread his palms flat on the briefing table and looked around the room. Six young faces stared back at him-a logistics coordinator, two field monitors, a translator, a finance officer, and a program assistant. Seven people gathered before the city woke, in a whitewashed room that smelled of cardamom and old concrete, in a country that had spent years learning to live inside its own wounds.

He had been asked to lead the morning devotional. He almost declined. What could he offer to people who had already seen more waiting-more unanswered longing-than most people see in a lifetime?

Then he remembered a little girl. Not his own daughter. Just a story he had carried for years.

“Somewhere,” Jonathan began, “there is a child in the back seat of a car. Her family is driving to an amusement park. She has been waiting for this day for weeks. And now finally, she sees them: Colorful signs on the side of the road. She starts gathering her things. She thinks they have arrived. But the signs keep coming. And the road keeps going.”

A quiet ripple of recognition moved around the table. The translator smiled. The logistics coordinator looked down.

Jonathan continued. “She doesn’t know yet that those signs are not the destination. They are announcements. They say: you’re getting closer, but you’re still miles away. And the hardest part? She can’t see the park from the back seat. She has to trust the driver.” -Who is the Driver? It’s her dad.

I. David Knew the Road Was Long

Jonathan opened his worn copy of Psalm 27. He did not read it like a man performing Scripture. He read it like a man who had sheltered inside it. -Taken refuge or sought protection. (* Psalms -why /What)

David wrote this psalm somewhere between the promise and its fulfilment. He had been anointed king. He had not yet sat on a throne. Between those two moments stretched years of caves, hunger, betrayal, and waiting that had no clear end date. Yet listen to what David says:

“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Psalm 27:13 (NIV)

“Notice,” Jonathan said, “King David does not say, I will see it when I deserve it. Or I will see it when the war is over. Or I will see it when I understand why all this happened. He says, I remain confident. Present tense or Active tense. The waiting has/had not cancelled the hope.”

The signs are not the destination, but they tell you the Driver knows the way. The driver is in control.

II. ‘Waiting’ Is Not Wasting

Working in Broken countries had taught them all something about waiting. Waiting for approvals. Waiting for ceasefires. Waiting for supply routes to reopen. Waiting for news from families displaced to other cities. Waiting for something to mean something again.

Jonathan leaned forward. “I want to say something to you this morning that I wish someone had said to me years ago, in a tent in a different broken country –‘Waiting is not evidencing that God has forgotten you’. Sometimes waiting is the road itself. The journey between the promise and the fulfilment is not empty. God is working inside the miles.”

He paused. Outside, a motorbike started up. Somewhere down the street, a vendor was already calling. The city was beginning.

“The signs”, Jonathan said quietly, “are real. The hard days -the fatigue, the grief, the slow grinding of this work -those are real signs that you are on a road that matters. But the signs are not the end of the story. Be strong. Take heart. Wait for the Lord to do His part. David says it twice in one verse -because he knew how hard it is to believe the first time.”

For Reflection

1. Where in your life right now are you most tempted to confuse the signs with the destination- to grow or feel discouraged because you are still on the road?

2. What would it look like, today, to “remain confident” as David did, not denying the hardship, and refusing to let it be the final word?

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“My heart and flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself -a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.” [Psalm 84: 2–3]

The road rises before him like a prayer half-spoken-winding, unhurried, faithful. Jonathan has been walking since the pale edge of dawn, before the Syrian hills had fully shaken the night from their shoulders, when the world still held its breath between darkness and the first gold of morning. He does not walk quickly. A man who walks quickly toward holiness only trips on his own eagerness. He walks the way rivers move through limestone with purpose, yes, but also with surrender, allowing the land to shape the going.

The countryside is ancient around him, and he feels it. Olive trees stand like crooked patriarchs along the terraced slopes, their silver leaves turning in a breeze that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once-as if the land itself is exhaling something sacred it has held since before memory. The soil beneath his boots is the color of burnt umber, dry and generous, and it gives a little with each step, as though the earth too is bowing to receive him. Or perhaps to remind him: you too are made of this. You too shall return.

And yet he does not feel heavy. He feels and this is the word he reaches for and cannot quite hold -light. Not weightless, no. He is weighted through with all the accumulated freight of the years: the missed postings, the fruitless waiting, the long silences in which God seemed to speak only in riddles. All of that is still there. But it is rearranged. It is no longer burden. It has become ballast -the holy kind, the kind that keeps a ship from capsizing when joy comes on suddenly and threatens to lift it clean out of the water.

“He is not walking toward a place.

He is walking toward a Presence —

and the Presence is already walking toward him.”

He stops at a bend where the track opens wide and Sednaya appears, impossibly high above him, the monastery of Our Lady perched at the summit of its rock as though it had always been there as though the mountain grew up around it rather than the other way around. And perhaps it did. Perhaps this is one of those places where stone and sky conspired together long ago, set apart, prepared, waiting for the moment when the wanderer would arrive to complete the scene. A sob moves through his chest -not grief, or not grief only. Something older. Something he has no language for except to say: I know this. I have never been here, and I know this.

He thinks of Mary, the mother of the Master, and how she too walked roads like this -Galilean roads, hill roads, roads that asked everything of the feet and gave everything back to the soul. He thinks of her yes -that singular, world-altering yes, spoken in a room in Nazareth to a messenger with fire for wings. He is not her. He is only a logistician with a worn-out pack and a heart too full for its own good. But he is her in this: that he, too, is learning to say yes before he fully understands what is being asked. Yes, to the road. Yes, to the summit. Yes, to whatever the Master wishes to do with whatever is left of him.

A bell sounds from above. A single toll, clear and ancient, falling through the morning air like a stone dropped into still water -slow, perfect, spreading out in rings that seem to reach further than sound should be able to reach. Jonathan closes his eyes. The bell is not calling him to a schedule. It is not summoning him to duty. It is simply announcing, quietly, to all the hills and all the wayfarers who have ever walked this track with tired legs and breaking-open hearts:

He is here. He has always been here. Come.

And Jonathan walks on. Upward. His eyes bright with a joy that has no explanation except the truest one: he is loved was loved before he set out, will be loved when he arrives, is loved right now in the mid-stride moment when the path is still steep and the summit still far and the bell is still ringing through the limestone air of the Qalamoun hills. The Master has done this. The Master always does this. He does not wait at the destination. He meets you on the road.

Crumbs & Wonders began as a quiet act of obedience -a wayfarer putting words to the journey. It has since become something I tend to with both hands and an open heart. If these stories of faith, flavor, and the road have nourished something in you, I'd be honored if you'd consider supporting the work through a free subscription-

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I. The Terminal Between Stories

The plastic seat was harder than he remembered. Gate 14. Departure in ninety minutes. Jonathan set his battered carry-on against the wall, the same bag that had crossed a dozen borders, slept in a dozen tents and pressed his forehead briefly against the cool of the window.

Below him, aircraft moved like slow great creatures across the tarmac. One turned into the runway threshold, held still for a long breath, then accelerated — that sudden white blur of intention and lifted, almost effortlessly, into the low grey sky.

He watched it go. Something caught in his chest.

He had not been sure, even last week, that he would be back in an airport. The months of waiting of empty inboxes and polite rejection letters and mornings that did not know his name had done their slow, particular damage. He had come close to believing that his season in the field was simply over. That God had quietly closed that chapter without telling him directly, the way a river sometimes simply disappears into the earth.

But here he was. Boarding pass in hand. A new posting unexpected, almost absurd in how it arrived, a single phone call on a Tuesday afternoon when he had been doing nothing more sacred than warming leftover soup and his heart, that stubborn organ, had simply broken open with gratitude.

God does not lose track of His wayfarers. He simply lets them rest before He calls them back to the sky.

II. What an Airplane Dreams

Jonathan had a thought the kind that arrives sideways, half prayer and half poem that an airplane dreams.

Not in the mechanical sense, of course. But he had spent enough years in the field, watching things that should not move somehow move, to know that God embeds longing into the things He makes. The soil aches toward rain. The seed strains toward light. The river, even dammed, remembers the sea.

And an airplane grounded, hangered, dark -what does it dream of?

He thought it dreams of altitude. Of that moment when the wheels leave the earth and the aircraft becomes, briefly, a miracle - tons of metal and fuel held aloft by nothing more than the logic of lift and the courage of forward motion. It dreams of the moment when all the weight ceases to feel like weight and becomes instead direction.

It does not dream of staying on the ground. A grounded aircraft is not its truest self. It is waiting. And waiting Jonathan had learned in the long months behind him is not the same as being forgotten.

A grounded aircraft is not its truest self. Neither are we, when fear keeps us from the skies God built us for.

III. The Mechanics of a Human Life

He watched another plane taxi slowly toward its runway. It moved with a peculiar patience, guided by a ground crew it could not see from inside, trusting signals it had not authored.

How like us, he thought.

There is a pre-flight phase to every human life-a season of inspection and calibration, of slow movement on the ground that feels like nothing but delay. We are checked and fueled and held at the gate long past the hour we thought we would depart. The waiting burns. We watch others lift off. We question the tower. We wonder if our flight plan has been cancelled without our knowledge.

But the ground crew knows things the passenger does not. The tower sees weather the window cannot. And the God who calls a man into humanitarian work into refugee camps and disaster zones and the long, unbeautiful labor of staying when everyone else has left does not misfile the paperwork. He does not lose a wayfarer in the system. He holds the boarding pass until the moment is right, and then He calls the name.

Jonathan’s name had been called.

He smiled at the window, a little abashed at his own relief. It was not that he had doubted God, exactly. He had simply doubted the timeline. He had applied his own preferred departure time to a flight that God was scheduling. And God, gracious as always, had simply waited for Jonathan to stop arguing with the clock.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

IV. Thrust, Lift, and the Grace of Forward Motion

He thought about what it actually takes for a plane to fly. He was not an engineer, but he had once sat next to one on a six-hour flight and the man had, apparently, taken Jonathan’s polite interest for genuine expertise and proceeded to explain, in precise and wonderful detail, the physics of flight.

Thrust and lift, the engineer had said. Thrust is the engine-the raw forward push against resistance. Lift is what the shape of the wing creates as air passes over it. Without thrust, there is no lift. Without lift, thrust alone only sends you crashing down the runway. They must work together.

Jonathan had thought about that conversation many times in the months of waiting. He had tried to maintain thrust, the forward push of prayer, of small obedience, of keeping his skills current, of not retreating entirely into bitterness. But he had felt the lift simply absent. As if the shape of his life was not, in that season, creating the conditions for flight.

He understood now that he had been wrong. The lift had been there. He simply could not feel it from inside the hangar.

God works in exactly this way. He does not always let us feel the lift while He is generating it. He simply asks for continued thrust continued faithfulness in the ordinary, continued surrender of the departure time and the lift, invisible, is being built into the airstream around our lives. And then, when He is ready, He opens the runway and everything comes together at once, and we are airborne before we fully understand what has happened.

Keep the engine of faithfulness running. God is already shaping the wings. The lift will come.

V. Back on the Road and Grateful for It

The gate agent’s voice crackled over the intercom. Boarding would begin in twenty minutes. Jonathan felt the familiar quickening that particular alertness that the field called up in him, the sense of self that only activated when he was moving toward something harder and more necessary than ordinary life.

He picked up his carry-on and thought of Sara, who had held his hand through every doubting month and said, with a consistency that had begun to feel almost prophetic, that she believed this posting would come. He would call her from the gate. He would tell her that she had been right, as she usually was.

He thought of the colleagues waiting at the other end the new team he had not yet met, the community whose faces he did not yet know, the work that would be unglamorous and exhausting and quietly holy in the way that all work done in love is holy.

He thought of the airplane dreaming in its hangar, waiting for the tower’s word.

And he thought: I was that airplane. Grounded, not abandoned. Still. Not forgotten. Held by a God who is not confused by delays, who has never once misread a departure board, who calls His wayfarers back to the sky in His own perfect time and says, simply: the runway is clear. You are cleared for take-off.

Jonathan shouldered his bag. He walked to the gate.

He was a wayfarer again.

Reflection

Are you grounded in a season you did not choose? Is the waiting longer than you planning, the silence louder than you expected? Perhaps today’s invitation is this: trust the tower. The God who made you for flight has not cancelled your departure. He is preparing the runway. He is shaping the lift. He asks only for your continued faithfulness in the hangar -prayer, presence, small obedience and He will call your name when the sky is ready.

You were not made to stay earthbound. You were made to soar.

A Wayfarer’s Prayer

Lord of every departure and every arrival,

thank You that You do not lose Your wayfarers.

In the seasons of grounding, when the runway feels far

and the skies feel closed to us -teach us to trust the tower.

Renew our strength. Shape our wings in the waiting.

And when You say the word, let us go

unafraid, unashamed, and wholly Yours.

Cleared for take-off. In Your name. Amen.

This Ethiopian Honey Tart carries within it the essence of biblical hospitality, that ancient practice of welcoming strangers as Christ Himself. Born from a humble encounter in a Greek refugee camp, where Ethiopian believers shared their precious wild honeycomb despite having so little, this recipe bridges continents and hearts. The widow’s term “mare” (sweetie in Amharic) echoes the sweetness of fellowship that transcends language. Here, Manuka honey honors that memory, while cardamom whispers of spice routes and ancient trade, reminding us that breaking bread together has always been sacred. The dish was popularized by Ethiopian Israeli chef Elazar Tamano, inspired by the white honey and hospitality of his father’s village in Ethiopia.

Ingredients

For the Blessed Pastry

• 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

• 3 tablespoons powdered sugar

• Pinch of kosher salt

• 7 ounces cold unsalted butter (or clarified ghee), cubed

• 2 large egg yolks

For the Golden Honey Custard

• 4 large egg yolks

• 5½ tablespoons Manuka honey (or raw wildflower honey)

• 4 tablespoons cornstarch

• 2½ cups heavy cream

• ¾ cup sugar

• ½ teaspoon kosher salt

• ½ teaspoon freshly ground cardamom

To Finish

• Flaky sea salt

• Fresh oregano blossoms or hyssop sprigs

Preparation

Step 1: Prepare the Pastry Crust

Combine flour, powdered sugar, and salt in a food processor. Add cold butter pieces and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add egg yolks and pulse just until dough begins to clump together—do not overwork. Turn out onto a clean surface, gather into a disk, wrap tightly in plastic, and rest in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Step 2: Create the Honey Custard

Whisk together egg yolks and honey in a medium bowl; set aside. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, blend cornstarch with 3 tablespoons of cream until smooth. Gradually whisk in remaining cream, sugar, salt, and ground cardamom. Place over medium-low heat, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon, approximately 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Very slowly, drizzle the hot cream mixture into the egg-honey bowl while whisking vigorously to temper. Press plastic wrap directly onto the custard surface and chill for at least 30 minutes.

Step 3: Prepare Your Workspace

Preheat oven to 325°F. Generously butter a 9-inch tart pan with removable bottom.

Step 4: Roll and Shape

Place chilled dough between two sheets of parchment paper and roll to ⅛-inch thickness. Gently fit the dough into your prepared pan, pressing into corners and up the sides. Trim excess dough along the rim, reserving scraps for patching. Freeze the shell for 15 minutes.

Step 5: Blind Bake the Foundation

Line the frozen tart shell with parchment paper, then aluminum foil. Fill with pie weights or dried beans. Bake for 10 minutes until edges just begin to turn golden. Carefully remove weights, foil, and parchment.

Step 6: Fill and Bake

Pour the chilled honey custard into the par-baked shell, smoothing the top gently. Bake for 40-45 minutes until the filling is set with a slight wobble in the Centre and has deepened to an amber hue. Cool completely on a wire rack for at least 2 hours before slicing.

Step 7: Serve with Intention

Just before serving, sprinkle flaky sea salt over the tart and garnish with oregano blossoms or hyssop—herbs mentioned throughout Scripture as symbols of purification and blessing.

Nutrition Facts (Per Slice, 8 servings)

Calories: 485 | Total Fat: 32g | Saturated Fat: 19g | Cholesterol: 235mg | Sodium: 220mg | Carbohydrates: 45g | Fiber: 1g | Sugars: 28g | Protein: 6g

This tart is rich in healthy fats from butter and cream, providing energy and satisfaction. Honey offers natural antioxidants and trace minerals, while eggs contribute protein and essential vitamins.

A Christian Home Baker’s Wisdom

The Secret of Butter’s Blessing: In Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, niter kibbeh (spiced clarified butter) is considered sacred used in fasting meals and celebrations alike. For this tart, use the finest butter you can find, preferably European style with higher fat content, or render your own ghee with a whisper of prayer. Cold butter creates the flakiest crust; room-temperature butter makes tender custard. This duality mirrors our faith—sometimes we must be strong and structured, other times soft and yielding.

The Baker’s Whisper: When tempering your eggs into hot cream, move slowly and breathe deeply. Rushing creates scrambled eggs; patience creates silk. This is the kitchen’s lesson in trust—just as we must slowly absorb God’s word into our lives, letting it transform us gently rather than overwhelming us all at once.

On Honey: Choose raw, unfiltered honey when possible. Proverbs 24:13 tells us, “Eat honey, my son, for it is good.” This golden nectar hasn’t changed since ancient times—it’s the same substance that sustained John the Baptist in the wilderness and that flows in the promised land of milk and honey.

A Meditation on Making and Sharing

This tart is more than dessert—it is spiritual devotion. When we bake for our families, we echo Ruth gleaning in fields, the widow sharing her last flour, Christ breaking bread with disciples. Each measured cup becomes a prayer. The Ethiopian mother’s whisper of “mare” reminds us of our kitchens are altars of sacrificial love. This golden tart embodies Hebrews 13:2: showing hospitality to strangers, we may entertain angels unaware. The butter speaks of God’s generous provision, the honey of His promised abundance. Every slice shared becomes fellowship, every bite a reminder that sweetness exists in a broken world. “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.” [ Psalm 34:8]

May your kitchen be blessed, and may this tart carry whispers of joy to all who gather at your table.

The Honey Custard: A Meditation on Divine Sweetness

Just as the honey custard requires patient tempering hot cream slowly united with fragile eggs through gentle, constant stirring, so God tempers His infinite glory to meet us in our weakness, transforming us without breaking us into something golden and complete.

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“For God so loved the world...” [ John 3:16]

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” [Romans 3:23]

The Man from the Wrong Side of the Map

Jonathan had learned long ago that suffering does not check a passport before it arrives. He had seen that truth in the reed camps of North Greece, in the collapsed schoolrooms of Haiti, in the dust-blown alleys of a Syrian border town whose name the world’s news cycle had already forgotten. Suffering showed up wherever people were and so, eventually, did he.

It was Easter morning when Jonathan sat alone in a small wooden church on the edge of one of Aotearoa’s harbours, a city he and his wife had arrived in only some 18-19 months before, still finding his footing after years of movement and mission. The congregation was small, warm, and wonderfully ordinary -a retired nurse, a Māori family three rows deep, a young Pacific Islander couple with a toddler who kept escaping the pew. Jonathan, a pepper & salt -haired man whose skin had been burnished by a dozen different suns, felt entirely at home and entirely out of place at once. That particular tension, he had learned, was the precise address where grace tends to live. The pastor, a soft-spoken Kivi man named Arther Ray had chosen to preach not on the empty tomb first, but on the road to it. Specifically, on a man most congregations pass over in a sentence: Simon of Cyrene.

— ✦ —

A Stranger Pressed into Service

“He was just passing through,” Pastor Ray said, his voice quiet and unhurried. “Simon of Cyrene. He hadn’t come to Jerusalem to witness a crucifixion. He had come, most likely, for the Passover. He was a pilgrim, a traveler, a man from Africa, from what we now call Libya perhaps dark-skinned, almost certainly foreign to the crowds lining the Via Dolorosa that Friday. And the Roman soldiers, without ceremony or choice offered to Simon, pressed him into service. They put the cross on his shoulders.”

Jonathan felt something shift in his chest. He had read those verses dozens of times Matthew 27:32, Mark 15:21, Luke 23:26, the Synoptic chorus that places this one man at the hinge-point of history. But he had never sat with it long enough to feel the weight of what it meant.

“As they led him away, they seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus.” [Luke 23:26]

An African man. A pilgrim. A stranger pressed into proximity with the Son of God at the moment of His greatest suffering. Not chosen for his theology. Not selected for his credentials. Simply there. In the crowd. In the path. And the cross found him.

“The cross,” Pastor Ray continued, “did not ask Simon what he believed before it rested on his shoulders. And the Saviour, stumbling ahead, did not turn and say: wait, are you the right kind of person to help Me? The moment made no such distinctions. The road to Calvary was the most radically inclusive road in all of history.”

— ✦ —

The Same Road, Many Countries Later

Jonathan closed his eyes and the church in the quaint port city dissolved. In its place rose a memory -layered, vivid, relentless as ever. He saw Mohammed, a young Somali interpreter who had worked with Jonathan’s team outside Policastro (up north Greece), who had once asked him, during a long night in a field clinic, whether Jonathan’s God was a God for Somalis too, or only for Westerners who could afford faith as a comfortable Sunday habit.

He saw Priya, a Hindu woman in a Chennai at the Tsunami displacement camp who had sat with Jonathan’s colleague through the long hours after the waters settled down, asking nothing of her beliefs, offering rice and a mat and the particular grace of presence.

He saw Thomas from Kinshasa-brilliant, quietly devout, who had once said to Jonathan over a shared meal of fufu and stew: “Your Jesus walked through Africa on that cross, my friend. Simon carried Him. Don’t let anyone tell you the story began in Europe.”

They had all, in their various and irreducible ways, helped carry something. They had all stumbled into the road of need, of mercy, of fragile human solidarity and been changed by it. Jonathan had watched them, learned from them, and returned home from each deployment slightly more undone which is to say, slightly more human than before.

The world he had moved through was a world of caste and colour, of creed and clan, of borders drawn in blood and redrawn in bureaucratic ink. And yet, again and again, in the worst of places, he had watched those walls become irrelevant in the face of a child who needed water, a mother who needed a hand, a man who needed to know that someone had seen him.

— ✦ —

What the Cross Was Always Saying

When Jonathan opened his eyes, Pastor Ray was at the heart of it now, his voice carrying something barely contained, the way a river carries force quietly before it falls.

“We have all,” the pastor said, “fallen short. Every single one of us. The Book of Romans does not say ‘some have sinned.’ It does not say ‘those people over there have fallen short.’ It says all. The African pilgrim and the Roman soldier. The Pharisee and the thief. The aid worker and the refugee. The wealthy and the wretched. All of us stand at the same deficit before the father and all of us are invited into the same rescue.”

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” [Romans 3:23–24]

The cross, Jonathan understood now with a clarity that felt almost physical, was not a Western symbol or an Eastern one. It was not erected for one ethnicity, one century, one tribe of the religiously well-behaved. It stood at the intersection of heaven and earth and that intersection runs through every country Jonathan had ever set foot in. Through every face he had ever cupped his hands around in prayer. Through every camp, every clinic, every broken border crossing where he had watched people arrive with nothing and be received with something.

Yahweh, the great I AM, the God of Abraham and of all the unnamed tributaries of human longing that flow toward Him had not sent His Son to repair a regional relationship. He had sent Him to bridge a universal rupture. The fall of humanity was not a local incident. The Resurrection was not a local remedy. The tomb was empty for Mohammed and for Priya and for Thomas. For the Māori family three rows ahead. For the toddler now sleeping peacefully against her father’s shoulder. For Jonathan himself, grey-haired and grateful and still finding his way, a wayfarer who had spent his life moving toward need, only to discover that the deepest need was the one inside his own chest, and that it had already been met, on a Friday, on a hill, by a Man who let a stranger from Africa help Him carry the weight.

This Easter, the Door Is Still Open

After the service, Jonathan stood at the harbor’s edge, the Pacific wind pulling at his coat, the Tasman Sea stretching wide and indifferent and beautiful before him. He thought of all the coastlines he had stood on -the Gulf of Aden, the Aegean-on Thessaloniki port, the Bay of Bengal each one a border between what was and what might be.

He thought of Simon of Cyrene walking home that evening, changed forever, carrying nothing now but the memory of a Man’s weight, and perhaps the first trembling shoots of something he could not yet name. He took out his worn leather journal and wrote a single line -the kind of line he sometimes left at the top of a devotion for his readers, the small congregation of wayfarers and wonderers who had found their way to his little blog:

“The cross had room for everyone who carried it, and the tomb had room for no one who had been placed inside it. He is risen. That changes everything - for all of us.”

If you are reading this today, wherever today finds you, whatever colour your hands are, whatever the name of the God you were raised with or the god you have rejected, whatever country issued your passport or denied you one — this Easter message is not for a category of people. It is for you. Specifically, irreducibly, tenderly: for you.

We have all fallen short. And we have all been invited home. The Father did not draw a narrow door. He drew a cross arms wide, reaching in every direction, stretching from one end of the human family to the other. Simon of Cyrene did not ask for the honor. He simply found himself in the road. And the road led somewhere he could never have imagined.

Perhaps that is where you too are, on the road, unsure how you got here, suddenly close to something heavier and more beautiful than you expected. Let it rest on you for a moment. The One walking ahead of you has already borne the worst of it.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

- The Wayfarer

— ✦ —

A Moment to Pause

✦ Where in your life have you felt like the outsider -the one pressed into a story not your own?

✦ Who, in your world, has carried something heavy on your behalf? Have you thanked them?

✦ What does it mean to you personally that the cross was carried by a man from Africa - that salvation’s story runs through every continent?

✦ If “all have sinned” - what does it feel like to know that “all” are also welcomed by grace?

“Two are better than one… and a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9,12). Crumbs & Wonders has always been more than a blog -it’s a shared table. If these stories of faith, flavor, and the wayfarer’s road have meant something to you, I’d be deeply grateful for your support through subscribing. You help keep the crumbs coming.

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as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”

— 1 Peter 4:10 (NIV)

— ✦ —

The basket was an unremarkable thing-a small, grey, made of the kind of cheap plastic that lines the shelves of bazaar stalls in Cox’s Bazar. Jonathan had bought it one afternoon for next to nothing, and it had found its home on the small wooden crate beside his makeshift sink inside the tent that served as both his office and his living quarters.

He used it for one purpose alone: washing vegetables. Each evening before cooking, he would carry it to the tap, rinse the day’s okra or green chilies, and set them out to dry. It was a small ritual. A humble act of care in a place where nothing was permanent and everything was provisional.

Then one morning, Brahmanand appeared at the tent entrance -a quiet, gentle Bengali man from the coastal stretch of Noagaon, who had been a domestic worker for more years than he likely cared to count. He had kind eyes and calloused hands, and he moved through the small space with the practiced efficiency of someone long accustomed to making order out of other people’s chaos.

He stopped when he saw the basket. “Dada,” he said, tilting his head, “why are you keeping the garbage bin inside the kitchen?”

Jonathan looked at the basket, then at Brahmanand, and laughed softly. “That’s my vegetable basket,” he said. “For washing.”

Brahmanand blinked, then nodded slowly, satisfied. But something in Jonathan was not quite finished with the moment.

The world often decides the value of things by the way we treat them.

That night, the monsoon arrived in its full fury. Rain hammered the canvas roof of his tent in great rolling waves, and Jonathan sat on the small plastic stool he kept in the entryway, what he generously called his balcony and watched the camp turn to silver and mud beneath the downpour.

He was thinking about the basket. About how easily it had been misread. It sat beside his sink, humble and ordinary. It had no label, no sign. Its meaning was determined entirely by its context by where it was placed, and how it was held.

And his mind moved, as it often did in that place, to the refugees. He had walked among them all week through lanes of tarpaulin and bamboo, past cooking fires and children’s laughter and the quiet devastation of people who had lost everything. He had listened. He had sat with them in their hunger and their grief.

He had noticed, too, how the world treated them. How the way others looked at them seemed to shape the way even their neighbors and fellow displaced persons regarded each other with suspicion sometimes, or with dismissal, or with the particular cruelty of those who are themselves desperate and afraid.

We treat people the way we see others treat them, he thought. We let the world’s assessment become our own. And we forget what the scripture has always insisted: that every person carries within them something given by God ,some grace, some gift, some irreducible dignity.

Jonathan had heard it first in Sunday school, in some church far from here, in a life that seemed to belong to someone else. He had heard it again in the voice of the elderly Rohingya grandmother who had pressed a small, crumpled piece of cloth into his hands last Tuesday -an embroidered panel she had somehow carried across the Naf River -saying only, “Remember us.”

He held that memory now the way you hold something fragile in both hands. Not because she was asking him to solve anything. But because she had trusted him to see her. Truly see her.

The rain eased to a murmur. Somewhere in the camp, a child was singing.

Jonathan picked up the basket from the crate, turned it over in his hands, and set it back down carefully. Not like garbage. Like something worth keeping.

— ✦ —

Reflection

There is a quiet theology in the way we handle ordinary things. The basket needed no label to declare its purpose, but it needed to be treated as what it truly was. So do the people around us.

In a world that assigns worth by visibility, productivity, and status, the gospel makes a different claim. Every person bears the image of God -the Imago Dei -and every act of dignity we extend toward another is a form of proclamation. We are saying: this one has value. This one is seen.

How often do we absorb the world’s verdict on people, on the poor, the displaced, the forgotten and unconsciously repeat it in the way we speak to them, look past them, or fail to look at all? And how often might we reclaim the radical posture of Christ, who saw what others overlooked, and treated the unvalued as beloved?

A Closing Prayer

Lord, forgive us for the times we have let the world teach us how to see. Forgive us for the people we have reduced, dismissed, or made invisible not with malice, but with an unexamined gaze.

Give us eyes like Yours. Eyes that see past the surface to the grace buried inside every person we encounter. Teach us to handle people the way we would handle something precious because they are. Because You made them so.

And where we have forgotten this — in our homes, our communities, our camps and our comfortable lives — call us back. Let how we treat the least among us become the truest measure of what we believe about You. Amen!!

— ✦ —

From the field notes of Jonathan Wayfarer · Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

Scripture reminds us that “he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed” (Proverbs 11:25). Writing these stories is my small act of that refreshing and your support is what sustains it. If Crumbs & Wonders has been a welcome place at your table, consider becoming subscriber. It means more than words can say.

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“Closing early today. It’s Maundy Thursday. I have to go to Mass”.

Something in the ordinary holiness of that sentence broke open a room inside him he hadn’t visited in some time. He wrapped both hands around his cup, watched the steam curl, and let memory lead him gently backward, to a voice, a poem, a pair of hands raised in blessing over a broken world.

What you are about to read is not only Jonathan’s story. It is the story of every ordinary person who has ever been shepherded through darkness by another ordinary person who somehow carried the sacred in their hands.

THE POEM HE COULD NOT FORGET

He couldn’t remember who had first recited it to him. It might have been the old Jesuit chaplain in a Port-au-Prince field hospital after the earthquake, or the grey-haired nun who ran the feeding station outside Mosul, or the Anglican padre who appeared one evening at a little displacement camp at the edge of the small Greek village Policastro, with nothing but a thermos of tea and an unshakeable peace about him. Whoever it was, the poem had taken root.

We need them in life’s early morning,

we need them again at its close.

we feel their warm clasp of friendship,

we seek them tasting life’s woes.

At the altar each day we behold them.

When we are tempted and wander

to pathways of shame and sin,

it’s the hand of a priest that will absolve us -

not once, but again and again.

And when we are taking life’s partner,

other hands may prepare us a feast,

but the hand that will bless and unite us

is the beautiful hand of a priest.

God bless them and keep them all holy,

for the host whose fingers caress.

when the hour of death comes upon us

may our courage and strength be increased,

by seeing raised over us in anointing

the beautiful hands of a priest.

He had wept the first time he heard it. Not from sentimentality, as Jonathan was not a sentimental man, but because the poem pressed on something real and aching: the knowledge that in his hardest moments, it had always been someone’s hands that had reached him. And many of those hands had belonged to men of God.

A LIFE SHAPED LIKE A CALLING

Father Emmanuel had been ordained at twenty-six in a small diocese in West Africa. He had not chosen the priesthood the way one chooses a career. It had chosen him-the way a river chooses its bed, with patient, irresistible pressure- through years of watching suffering that no one in power bothered to name, through late nights reading by candlelight, through a retreat where he had knelt on a stone floor until his knees ached and heard, in that ache, something very like a summons.

He had studied in Rome. He had served in a bush parish so remote that Mass vestments arrived by donkey. He had baptized infants as well as grownups in river water when nothing else was available, and administered last rites in languages he did not speak, trusting that God was a better translator than he would ever be.

When Jonathan first met him, Father Emmanuel was sixty-one and had the hands of a man who had used them — heavily, constantly, reverently. Broad palms, thick knuckles, fingers that had broken bread ten thousand times and still handled it as though it might, at any moment, become something holy.

“My hands are not my own,” he had told Jonathan once, with no drama in his voice. “They were lent to me for a purpose. I am trying to return them in better condition than I received them.”

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. [1 Peter 2:9]

Jonathan had thought about that verse for years. He thought about it now, in the café, as the afternoon dimmed and the café lady locked the door behind her and walked in the direction of the church.

THE HANDS IN THE FIELD

In the humanitarian world, Jonathan had met a great many priests. But he had also met people who were not priests by ordination, yet who functioned unmistakably as priests by vocation.

There was the Kenyan nurse who held dying strangers’ hands as though they were her own kin, murmuring prayers in Swahili with the same unselfconscious fluency with which she charted vitals. There was the young Swiss logistician who, despite being a confessed agnostic, would sit with newly displaced families in the evening and listen-really listen and with such quality of attention that people afterwards looked calmer, less alone, as though they had been, in some unnamed way, absolved.

There was the Ethiopian water engineer who blessed each new well before it was commissioned, not as an official ritual but because he believed, as he said, “that clean water is a prayer that works.” All of them had beautiful hands.

Jonathan had written in his journal once: “I am beginning to think the priesthood is wider than any one tradition knows. I am beginning to think God hands out vestments that are invisible to the eye but felt at the soul.”

WHAT MAUNDY THURSDAY INSISTS ON?

Maundy Thursday is the night of the towel and the basin.

It is the night when the Son of God-who, as John’s Gospel takes pains to note, knew exactly who he was and where he was going -knelt on the floor and washed his disciples’ feet. Not as a performance of humility. As an instruction.

Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. — John 13:14–15

Sitting in the café, Jonathan felt the weight of that exchange settle over him like a vestment.

This, he thought, was the priesthood that Peter was speaking of. Not an office. A posture. A willingness to kneel. A willingness to touch what is dirty and treat it as holy. To hold what is broken and call it beloved. To show up in life’s early morning and at its close -with open hands.

He thought of his own hands. Twenty plus years of fieldwork. Forms filled, crises managed, systems navigated. And yet, the moments that had mattered, the ones he would carry to his own grave-were not the systems. They were the hands.

The hand he had held in a cholera ward in Haiti. The child’s wrist he had steadied during a medical evacuation in the Cox’s Bazar. The shoulder of a colleague he had gripped in a parking lot in Nangarhar (Afghanistan) when the man was about to break under the weight of the work.

“We are all, in the end, either priests or deserts,” Father Emmanuel had said once. And Jonathan had not understood it then. But he understood it now.

THE CALLING THAT BELONGS TO ALL OF US

He ordered a second coffee -the café lady had left the machine on and trusted him to lock up, and he sat with the stillness of the emptied room.

He was not ordained. He did not wear a collar. He had never presided at an altar. But he had, he realized, lived something shaped very much like a priestly life: moving toward suffering rather than away from it, trying to hold space for the human and the sacred to meet, attempting to leave each place a little more whole than he found it.

And so had the nurse. And the logistician. And the water engineer. And the café lady, who had said “Maundy Thursday” with such quiet conviction that it had cracked him open at the seams.

The royal priesthood, Peter writes, belongs to all believers. It is not an elevation. It is an invitation into a particular kind of lowness, the lowness of the basin and the towel, of the hands raised not in triumph but in blessing, of the life poured out not in a single dramatic gesture but in ten thousand ordinary ones.

In early morning. At its close.

In the clasp of friendship. In the midst of woes.

Again, and again, and again.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship. [Romans 12:1]

Jonathan looked at his own hands wrapped around the coffee cup. Not beautiful, exactly. Scarred a little. Weathered. Marked by the work. But perhaps that was exactly right.

A CLOSING PRAYER FOR MAUNDY THURSDAY

Lord of the towel and the basin,

of the bread broken and the cup poured,

make of our hands what you made of Yours —

instruments of the sacred in the ordinary,

bearers of blessing in the broken places,

present in life’s early morning,

faithful at its close.

And when our hour comes,

may someone’s hands, raised over us in love,

remind us that we were never alone.

Amen!!

Crumbs & Wonders began as a quiet act of obedience - a wayfarer putting words to the journey that he and his colleagues once walked (And he still walks). It has since become something I tend to with both hands and an open heart. If these stories of faith, flavor, and the road have nourished something in you, I’d be honored if you’d consider supporting the work by just subscribing. Every subscription keeps the table set and the writing going.

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WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

There is a kind of cake that does not announce itself. It arrives quietly, wrapped in the scent of sun-warmed citrus, and by the time you have sat down at the table, it has already made itself at home in your memory. The Italian Gluten-Free Almond-Orange Cake is exactly that sort of cake unhurried, unfussy, and unforgettable.

Its roots run deep into the Mediterranean world. Long before the word “gluten-free” entered the culinary vocabulary, the cooks of southern Italy were baking with almonds out of necessity and ingenuity - wheat was not always plentiful, but almond trees blossomed along every hillside. The Moors, who ruled Sicily and southern Spain for centuries, brought with them the twin gifts of the almond and the orange, and their influence on the island’s baking traditions is still tasted in every bite. The marriage of these two ingredients is a very old one and a very happy one.

“A cake is never just a cake. It is memory, pressed into a pan and offered with both hands.”

The orange is the true storyteller of this recipe. Its rind, grated and folded into the batter, releases oils that perfume the crumb from within, so that every slice carries not just a flavor but a place, a particular morning in a particular kitchen in the sunlit south. The juice, bright and acidic, cuts through the richness of the almond flour and keeps the cake honest. Together, zest and juice create something that is more than the sum of its parts. That is the genius of this ancient combination.

A CAKE ACROSS CULTURES & CENTURIES

From medieval monastery kitchens to the modern allergen-aware table, this cake has been quietly inclusive long before inclusivity was a movement. It nourished pilgrims and peasants alike; today it graces the tables of the health-conscious and the gluten-intolerant with the same unhurried grace -a living bridge between ancient resourcefulness and contemporary care.

THE RECIPE

Serves:8 · Prep: 20 min · Bake: 40 min · Gluten-Free

Ingredients

• 4 large eggs, divided (yolks and whites separated)

• ¾ cup (150 g) white sugar

• 1 large orange — zest and juice (about ½ cup juice)

• ½ cup (120 ml) extra virgin olive oil or vegetable oil

• ⅛ teaspoon almond extract or orange extract (optional, but encouraged)

• 3 cups (300 g) almond flour

• ½ tablespoon baking powder

• Sliced almonds and powdered sugar, for serving

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (180°C). Grease or line an 8 or 9-inch round springform pan with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar together with a hand mixer or by hand until the mixture is pale, light, and ribbony — about two to three minutes. Do not rush this step; the aeration you build here carries the cake.

3. Add the orange zest, orange juice, oil, and almond or orange extract if using. Beat for two minutes more. The batter will smell extraordinary at this point. Trust it.

4. Add the almond flour and baking powder. Mix gently until the batter is smooth and combined. Set aside.

5. In a separate, clean bowl, beat the egg whites until they hold firm, glossy peaks. Do not overbeat you want peaks that hold their shape but still have a gentle shine.

6. Add a quarter of the beaten whites to the almond batter and stir gently to loosen it. Then fold in the remaining whites in two additions, moving your spatula around the edges of the bowl, underneath the batter, and up through the middle. Rotate the bowl as you go. Take your time. This folding is the breath that keeps the cake light.

7. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smooth the top, and scatter a generous handful of sliced almonds across the surface.

8. Bake for approximately 40 minutes, or until the cake is deep golden, set in the middle, and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs.

9. Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before releasing the springform. Dust generously with powdered sugar before serving. Serve at room temperature — this cake is at its most generous when it is not rushed.

✦ Baker’s Note: You may substitute the orange with lemon and a tablespoon of limoncello for a Caprese-style variation. Both are beautiful. Neither is wrong.

✦ Baker’s Note: The cake keeps well, covered at room temperature, for up to three days. It is, if anything, better on the second day.

✦ Baker’s Note: If you prefer a richer, nuttier crumb, use extra virgin olive oil — it deepens the flavor in a way that vegetable oil simply cannot match.

“The orange does not merely flavor this cake. It illuminates it — like a window thrown open on a warm morning.”

A NOTE FROM THE WAYFARER

To bake this cake, to fold the whites gently, to wait while the orange fragrance rises- is a kind of quiet devotion. A mother or grandmother who makes this for her family is not simply feeding them. She is offering herself: her patience, her knowledge, her love made edible.

And I, the Wayfarer, who has sat at tables from Cox’s Bazar to Khartoum (South Sudan) to the hills of Christchurch, have come to know this: we find God most reliably not in grand gestures, but in the shared meal. In the slicing of a warm, almond-scented cake, something holy passes between strangers. What the theologians call communion; the cook has always simply called dinner.

“They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.”-Acts 2:46

In a crumbling world, may this cake be your table. May every orange you zest be a small act of hope. And may whoever sit across from you be it a familiar face or a stranger just know, without being told, that they are welcome here.

“Pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.”

Psalm 62:8 (ESV)

Jonathan had found the passage in a dog-eared paperback somewhere between Cox’s Bazar and Colombo, tucked into the seat pocket of a half-empty prop plane. He couldn’t remember the author. He couldn’t remember the flight. But the words had lodged themselves in the marrow of him and refused to leave.

“No one tells you where to put the love when a person is no longer here to receive it. It doesn’t disappear. It sits in your chest -heavy, unused, turning into ache.”

He had read that sentence approximately forty-seven times since. He knew because he had begun counting — the way you count when the mind needs something small and measurable to hold onto.

“Some nights it spills out of your eyes. Other nights it just keeps you awake.”

This particular Tuesday, it was keeping him awake. He was up before five, the kitchen still dark, and he moved through it the way he had learned to move through most rooms lately -carefully, deliberately, as though the air itself were holding its breath.

The flour first. He had learned that. Always the flour first, measured and sifted into the wide ceramic bowl that had been his mother’s, cream-colored with a thin blue rim worn almost to nothing at the lip. Then the salt. Then the cool water, added slowly-not poured, never poured, but coaxed. He was making bread. Simple bread. The kind that asked nothing of him except his hands and his attention, which was really all he had to give these days.

Jonathan had spent seventeen years giving those hands to the work -to camps, clinics, schools and convoy routes, to the long governance of logistics that kept food moving toward hunger. He knew how to be useful. He had built his entire self around usefulness. And then one Tuesday much like this one-though nothing like this one, the work had ended. Not dramatically. Just a letter. A budget line. A polite phone call.

And then the silence.

He had all this love -for the work, for the people, for the version of himself who had known what to do next and nowhere left to put it.

He pressed his knuckles into the dough. It pushed back elastic and alive, warmer now than when he’d started. This was what he came to the kitchen for in the early hours. Not the bread, exactly. The conversation. The fact that something would respond.

His mind moved, as it often did now, to the faces. The boy at the water distribution point in Nia Kavala camp in Greece, who had insisted on shaking his hand with great ceremony before accepting a cup. The old woman outside Teknaf in Cox’s Baza, who had pressed a hard-boiled egg into his palm one morning and walked away without explanation. The colleague Priya who had laughed so loudly at his terrible Bangla that she’d had to sit down. He loved these people. He still loved them, even now, even here, even with flour on his forearms and a grey morning gathering at the window. The love had not moved. It was simply undeliverable. No address. No route.

He folded the dough and turned it, folded and turned, and somewhere in that rhythm he heard, or remembered, or maybe simply finally received, the words he had read a hundred times without absorbing:

“Pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.”

Psalm 62:8

Pour it out. Not manage it, not redirect it, not find a worthy channel for it. Pour it out before Him. Like water. Like grief. Like love with nowhere left to go.

Jonathan set the dough to rest beneath a clean cloth. He pulled a stool to the counter and sat down, and for a long time he did nothing at all except let himself feel the full weight of everything still living in his chest.

He thought of the faces. He let himself love them without apology. He thought of the work not its ending, but its substance, the years of it, the meaning of it. He let himself grieve it without flinching. And then, in a way he could not fully articulate, he poured it. All of it. Into the waiting, the quiet, the presence that he had spent most of his adult life moving too fast to sit still before.

He did not feel emptied. He felt, strangely, held.

When the bread came out of the oven two hours later, brown and faintly crackling at the crust, he sliced it and sat at the kitchen table in the full morning light. He ate slowly. He did not eat alone.

A Moment to Reflect

There is no love that God asks us to suppress, only love He invites us to bring. Every undeliverable feeling, every ache that sits wordless in the chest-Scripture does not call these burdens to be managed. It calls them to be poured.

You are not too much. Your grief is not too heavy. Your love is not wasted simply because the one it was for is no longer reachable. God is a refuge and a refuge, by definition, holds what is too large to be carried alone.

What are you carrying today that has nowhere left to go?

A Prayer

Lord, I have love that has run out of places to land. I have grief with no clean edges. I have ache I do not know what to do with. You said to pour it out — so here it is. All of it. Receive what I cannot carry. Be the refuge the Psalm promised. Let me eat my bread and know I am not alone. Amen.

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A Crumbs & Wonders Reflection

The Croissant — A Study in Patience, Layers & Remembrance

Few things in the kitchen demand what a croissant demands: laminated dough, formed by folding cold butter into flour again and again a process called ¹tourage, until hundreds of paper-thin layers of faith (and fat) create something extraordinary. Rush it, skip a fold, let the butter warm too soon, and the whole architecture collapses. There is no shortcut. There is only the discipline of returning, again and again, to the process. Like gratitude. Like prayer. Like remembrance.

¹A French baking term for the technique of laminating dough, which involves folding butter into dough multiple times to create hundreds of flaky, thin layers.

Part One — The Table Was Full

The morning smelled of cardamom tea and yesterday’s rain when Jonathan spread his map across the kitchen table for what felt like the ten-thousandth time. Not a real map, he hadn’t needed one of those in almost two years. This was the invisible map he kept in his chest: Mogadishu, Cox’s Bazar, Port-au-Prince, South Sudan. The shaded regions of a life well-spent, or so he had believed.

He had gone into the work of an aid worker not for the salary — there wasn’t much of one — but because of something that had ignited in him during a youth mission trip back in the day at age twenty-three, a fire that never quite went out. He had climbed the ladder slowly, assignment by assignment, until his name meant something in the corridors of NGO folks. He had sat across tables from government ministers. He had drunk tea with village elders. He had knelt in the rubble of earthquake aftermath and helped pull children from the debris.

And God had been good, startlingly, almost embarrassingly good.

The house they owned in the noisy suburb was paid off. Sara had her stable government job. Their two children had grown up with both passports and perspective. Jonathan remembered the leaky roof of his boyhood in the rural north, the kerosene lamp by which he had studied, the one pair of shoes somewhat too big for his feet that he wore to school and church or may be to every social and family event. The distance between that boy and this man with a mortgage was not merely geographical, it was miraculous.

But somewhere between headquarters and gratitude, something had shifted. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. The way a croissant dough goes wrong not with one catastrophic error but with one degree of warmth too many- the butter, imperceptibly, begins to absorb into the flour instead of maintaining its distinct, necessary layers. The structure looks the same on the outside. It is only in the oven or in the silence that the collapse becomes undeniable.

“

He had drunk from cisterns he did not dig, eaten from vineyards he did not plant, and had slowly, carelessly, forgotten the One who had led him there.

— Deuteronomy 6:11, reimagined

Part Two — The Cooling Rack

The contract ended in the early Autumn. There had been restructuring -donor priorities shifted, the program was absorbed into another and Jonathan, fifty-three years old with a CV that gleamed, found himself what the industry calls “between deployments.” He expected it would last three months. It had lasted fourteen.

At first, he had been gracious about it. He read. He cooked and baked, in fact he had always loved to cook, and during an assignment in Greece years ago he had learned to make croissants properly, from a retired boulangère named Madame Foret, French by birth who had been merciless about technique. “The dough does not lie,” she had told him, rolling pin in hand. “It will show you exactly what you did wrong.”

But as the months stretched, a familiar old spirit returned. The spirit of restlessness. Of measuring worth by productivity. By assignment. By impact metrics. By whether your name appeared in a situation report. He began to feel invisible. He began to feel like the man in his mirror was a stranger borrowing Jonathan’s face.

He did not speak about it much. He was a man of a certain generation and culture, where the weight of internal collapse was carried alone, pressed into the chest like butter pressed into dough. Sara sensed it Sara always sensed things, but he deflected her gentle enquiries with reassurances he did not fully believe.

And here was the wound beneath the wound: Jonathan had stopped praying. Not all at once. The way a lamp doesn’t extinguish-it just runs out of oil, quietly, with no announcement. Sunday attendance remained. The language of faith persisted. But the intimacy -the early morning stillness, the open Bible on the kitchen table, the unselfconscious conversation with God that had once been as natural as breathing, that had evaporated somewhere over the Pacific, somewhere between the still waters of Lake Taupo or the greens of the Coromandel .

He had been, without quite realizing it, running on the fumes of a former closeness.

✦ THE CROISSANT SPEAKS — TOURAGE & THE SOUL ✦

1. Make the détrempe. Combine flour, salt, sugar, yeast, milk. This is the beginning — the raw material God gives every life. It looks ordinary. It is not.

2. Rest overnight. The dough must be refrigerated before lamination begins. You cannot rush the formation of something that is meant to hold together under heat. Jonathan had never learned to rest well.

3. Begin the folds — tourage. Butter block placed at the center; dough folded over it like an envelope. Then fold. Chill. Fold again. Chill again. Six folds total. Each fold is an act of discipline. Each chill is an act of surrender. Skip one and the layers fail.

4. Watch the temperature. If the kitchen grows too warm — if ambition, pride, or fear heat the air — the butter melts into the flour and the distinct layers are lost. The thing looks like dough, but it has become only dough.

5. Shape. Proof. Bake. Only after all the patient, invisible work does the croissant enter the oven and become itself. The heat does not create the layers — it only reveals what was already there, or wasn’t.

Part Three — The Finger on the Page

It was a Tuesday. Sara had left for work. The house was quietly enormous in the way houses become when they are full of purpose and then suddenly are not. Jonathan sat by the side kitchen counter, the same table where the maps had once been spread, where the children had done homework, where grace was said but perhaps not always meant with his coffee and his Bible.

He was not reading devotionally. He was reading the way a man reads the terms and conditions of a document he suspects contains bad news. Scanning. Defensive. Protecting himself from whatever the text might require of him.

He had been working through Deuteronomy, largely without incident. The laws. The covenant. The rehearsal of history. And then his finger slowed. Chapter six. Verse eleven

“…and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns dug out, which you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant — and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

Deuteronomy 6:11–12, ESV

He read it once.

He read it again.

A third time, very slowly, his lips moving slightly the way they had when he was a boy reading by kerosene light with shoes slightly large for his feet.

The verse did not shout at him. It did not condemn from a great height. It simply, quietly, held up a mirror, the kind of mirror that shows you something so precisely true that your first instinct is to look away.

Houses full of good things which you did not fill. His house. His career. His reputation. His children’s education. His wife’s faithfulness. The paid mortgage. None of it dug by his hands alone. Not one cistern. Not one olive tree.

He had arrived in the promised land. He had eaten and been full.

And he had forgotten.

“

He had not lost his faith. He had simply stopped being faithful to it. The dough still looked like dough. But the layers — those patient, invisible, essential layers — had merged into one.

— Jonathan’s Reckoning

Part Four — Returning to the Fold

There is a moment in the making of a croissant, Madame Foret had described it with something approaching reverence -when after all the folding and chilling, the shaped crescents are left to proof for the final time. They look, she said, almost alive. They tremble faintly with the yeast working within them. And you must not open the oven door during those critical first minutes, because the sudden

change of temperature will cause them to collapse before they can rise.

“You must trust the heat,” she had told him. “You must trust what you cannot see is happening inside.”

Jonathan put the Bible down on the table and did not move for a long time.

Then he did something he had not done in a very long while. He did not perform it. He did not dress it with theological vocabulary. He simply bowed his head and spoke, plainly and without elegance, to the God of the kerosene lamp and the second-hand shoes, the God who had been present in Afghanistan and Cox’s Bazar, Haiti and South Sudan, but whom Jonathan had subtly, gradually, catastrophically crowded out with the noise of competence.

He said: I forgot YOU. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be a man who forgets.

The kitchen was still. No thunder. No immediate sensation of warmth or supernatural reassurance. But something -the croissant way, the deep internal way shifted. The layers that had merged began, tentatively, to separate again. This was not a dramatic reconversion. It was a return. A man coming home, finding the door not locked, the light still on.

In the weeks that followed, Jonathan began what he would later describe on his blog as “returning to tourage” -the discipline of daily returning to the fold, to the cold quiet of morning prayer, to gratitude that was specific and named rather than vague and habitual. He kept a journal and in it he wrote, each morning, one thing that was a filled cistern he had not dug himself. It became, in time, an impossible list so long, so extravagant, so humbling was the inventory of unearned grace.

The next deployment did come. It always does, in one form or another. But it came to a different Jonathan than the one who had waited for it -a man who had been returned to his layers, who understood that the fullness of his table was a gift requiring daily acknowledgement, and that prosperity without memory is the most sophisticated kind of poverty.

✦ THE LESSON FOR EVERY KITCHEN & EVERY LIFE ✦

You have eaten from tables you did not set. You live in structures held up by grace you did not earn. The warning of Deuteronomy 6:12 is not given to the suffering — it is given to the satisfied, to those whose cisterns are full. Fullness, not emptiness, is where forgetting lives. Return to the fold. Name the gift. Keep the layers distinct. Do not let the warmth of your own achievement melt what God has so carefully, patiently, lovingly layered into your life.

“You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies and his statutes, which he has commanded you. And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with you.”

Deuteronomy 6:17–18, ESV

✦ A PRAYER TO CARRY HOME ✦

Lord, you are the flour and the hand that works it.

You are the warmth of the oven and the patience of the chill.

Forgive us for the meals we ate in silence —

full bellies, empty thank-you.

Teach us again the discipline of remembrance.

Let every crumb of grace on our tables

call us back to You, who set the table,

who filled the cisterns,

who planted every vine

by which we have ever been fed.

Amen!

But there was a season when Jonathan nearly stopped believing that.

It happened in a small, un-named town on the edge of a conflict he is not permitted to name. A ceasefire had just collapsed, the third one that year. Jonathan’s team had spent six months building a feeding program for displaced families, brick by painstaking brick- supply chains negotiated, local trust earned, children’s names learned and written in a small notebook he kept in his breast pocket. He could recite them. He still can. And he does sometimes in his dreams at night, recalls his dear wife, Susan.

On the morning the program was meant to launch its permanent phase, the road was closed. Then the warehouse was seized. Then the funding wire delayed for reasons bureaucratic and cold, did not arrive. By evening, Jonathan sat on an upturned wooden crate in what had once been the distribution kitchen, and the emptiness of it, the silence where the voices of children should have been pressed down on him like a stone.

He had expected so much. He had planned, lobbied, prayed, prepared. And now there was nothing. Not even the dignity of a visible enemy to blame. Just the peculiar cruelty of collapsed logistics and a world indifferent to its own brokenness.

He opened his notebook to the list of children’s names and closed it again without reading.

That night, a local man- an elderly Armenian of the diaspora, as it happened, a distant cousin of the people Jonathan’s own Goan-Portuguese grandmothers had somehow befriended across impossible geographies of faith brought him tea. Not because he had anything to offer. He was himself a man with very little. He brought it simply because he saw a man sitting alone in the dark.

He sat beside Jonathan without a word for a long time. Then he said, in the unhurried way of men who have already lost everything once and survived it: “You came with a full cup, my friend. You cannot receive what God wants to pour when your cup is already full of your own plans.”

Jonathan looked at him.

The old man continued. “I had a friend once, a priest, who used to say, ‘Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for God can give him everything.’ He was quoting Swift, maybe. Or maybe Swift was quoting the Kingdom.”

Jonathan would turn that phrase over in his hands for years, the way a baker works dough -pressing, folding, letting it breathe, returning to it again and again.

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

Jonathan Swift wrote it as wit, perhaps even as cynicism -the clever Irishman’s armor against a world that breaks its promises. But the old man in that darkened kitchen had found something else inside it, the way you sometimes find a raisin in bread you didn’t know had raisins. Something sweet and unexpected in the middle of the dense.

Because the Scripture, Jonathan came to see, had always been whispering the same thing, only from a different direction.

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself,” said the Lord on the mountainside (Matthew 6:34). Not because tomorrow doesn’t matter. But because the man who comes to tomorrow with clenched fists full of his own expectations cannot receive the manna that waits there.

“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,” wrote Paul from a prison cell (Philippians 4:11). Learned. Not inherited. Not assumed. The word is labored, earned through exactly the kinds of collapsed plans and broken road closures that Jonathan knew.

And perhaps most piercingly of all, the Psalmist: “My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from Him” (Psalm 62:5, KJV). Not from the ceasefire. Not from the funding wire. Not from the program launch. The expectation -the only expectation that does not disappoint is from HIM.

Swift saw the cup half-empty and called it wisdom to stop expecting it to fill. Scripture does something stranger and more luminous: it says, empty the cup entirely, hold it out with both hands open, and discover that this posture - this un-held, unhurried, unclenched openness is precisely the shape of faith.

Three weeks after that night on the crate, the program relaunched. Different road, different warehouse, same children. Jonathan was there when the first family came through the door. A small girl - third name in his notebook, tugged his sleeve and held up to him, with the grave ceremonial seriousness of a six-year-old, half a biscuit. She wanted him to have some.

He had not expected that. He could not have planned it.

He has never forgotten it.

Now, settled between the Indian Ocean’s rhythm and the Pacific’s whisper, Jonathan bakes bread in his kitchen and calls it prayer. He has learned that the finest loaves come not from forcing the dough but from giving it time, giving it warmth, and then with open hands letting it become what it was always going to be.

He does not grip the outcome anymore.

He has learned what the old man tried to tell him in that dark room, what Paul scratched on the walls of his cell, what the Psalmist sang into the desert night: The man who empties his hands of expectations does not end up with nothing.

He ends up with room for the gift.

“My expectation is from Him.” [Psalm 62:5]

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed,” said Jonathan Swift

And perhaps -just perhaps what Swift meant as amour, God has always meant as an invitation.

🍞 A Crumbs-n-Wonders Reflection Where flour meets faith, and every empty cup is a kind of prayer.

The Southern Cross stands sentinel beneath a different sky.

Far from the jasmine-scented lanes where both their childhoods grew,

Two souls have made a covenant with mountains, mist, and dew.

The monsoon rains of memory still linger in their hearts,

Yet Aotearoa’s gentle winds have healed the older parts.

She walks beside him on these roads where silver fern trees lean,

And finds in autumn’s early blush a grace she’s never seen.

The temples of their younger days stand sacred, far and gold,

But every ridgeline here has psalms that wait to be retold.

March comes to them as pilgrims come with weariness and awe,

A season that both humbles them and fills each hidden flaw.

The children of the ancient soil now breathe a newer air,

And lay their South Asian roots like flowers in quiet prayer.

He takes her hand as evening falls on Taupo’s mirrored face,

And knows that every road they walked has led them to this place.

For God is not confined to shores where they were born and blessed,

His mercy moves through Southern stars and makes new land a nest.

So welcome, March, you’re tender month, your threshold’ soft and wide,

For Wayfarer’s have found their home in your bosom together, side by side.

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A Recipe Born from Centuries of Love

Cheesecake is one of humanity’s oldest desserts, tracing its roots to ancient Greece, around 776 BC - where simple cakes of fresh cheese, wheat, and honey fuelled athletes on the island of Samos before the Olympic Games. Rome adopted the recipe and carried it across a continent. By the Middle Ages, cheesecake had taken on a dozen new identities: baked in England, set with gelatine in Scandinavia, enriched with eggs and cream in Eastern Europe.

The modern American icon was born by happy accident in 1872, when New York dairyman William Lawrence, while attempting to recreate a French Neufchâtel, landed upon cream cheese instead. Richer, denser, and gloriously indulgent, it became the soul of the New York-style cheesecake- immortalized in the delis and bakeries of Manhattan and beloved ever since.

The fruit crumble topping has its own quiet heroism. It was born of wartime necessity in 1940s Britain, when rationing stripped kitchens of butter and sugar for pastry. Resourceful home cooks simply crumbled flour, oats, and whatever fat they had over fruit and created something arguably more delicious than the pie it replaced. The crumble outlasted the war and never left.

The Blueberry Crumble Cheesecake as we know it today emerged in American home baking culture during the 1980s and 1990s. Blueberries native to North America and cherished by Indigenous peoples for centuries in cooking and medicine were the natural partner: their vivid tartness cuts through the richness of cream cheese like a song.

A Beautiful Family of fruit-filled Cousins

This cheesecake belongs to a glorious family of fruit-crowned confections. The classic Strawberry Cheesecake needs little introduction. The Lemon Raspberry Tart shares the same bright-acid spirit. Cherry Clafoutis speaks to the French countryside. A Peach Crumble Cake evokes Southern summers. And the Mango Coconut Cheesecake nods warmly to tropical shores. Each shares the same simple philosophy: let good fruit and good cream tell the story.

More than a Dessert

From ancient Greek feasts to Manhattan delis to today’s summer gatherings, cheesecake has always carried people together. It graced royal tables, church potlucks, and backyard celebrations equally -a quiet, unifying sweet that crosses every culture and table.

What You will Need:

Crust & Crumble Topping

• 170g unsalted butter, melted

• 150g granulated sugar

• 50g light brown sugar

• 250g all-purpose flour

• 1/2 tsp salt

Cheesecake Filling

• 3 packages (227g each) cream cheese, room temperature

• 227g sour cream, room temperature

• 250g granulated sugar

• 4 large eggs, room temperature

• 1 tbsp pure vanilla extract

• 148g fresh or frozen blueberries

Vanilla Glaze (Optional)

• 60g powdered sugar

• 2 tbsp milk

• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract

• Pinch of salt

The Method

1. Preheat your oven to 325°F (165°C). Line the base of a 9- or 10-inch springform pan with parchment and grease the sides well.

2. Make the crumble: Combine butter, both sugars, flour, and salt in a large bowl. Mix with a fork or your fingers until the mixture clumps like damp sand.

3. Press two-thirds of the crumble mixture firmly into the base of your prepared pan to form the crust. Reserve the remaining crumble.

4. Make the filling: Beat the softened cream cheese, sour cream, and sugar in a stand mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes until silky smooth. Add vanilla, then eggs one at a time, beating just until combined — do not over-beat.

5. Pour the batter over the crust. Tap the pan firmly on the counter a few times to release any air bubbles.

6. Scatter the blueberries evenly across the top. Squeeze the reserved crumble into irregular pieces and scatter generously over the blueberries.

7. Bake on the middle rack for 1 hour, rotating once at the halfway point. The center will still wobble gently — this is exactly right.

8. Turn off the oven and leave the door slightly ajar. Allow the cheesecake to cool in the residual warmth for a full hour.

9. Remove, run a palette knife along the edges, and cool to room temperature on a wire rack. Cover with foil and refrigerate overnight.

10. To serve: Release the springform pan. Whisk together the glaze ingredients and drizzle lovingly over the top. Slice into 16 portions and serve with joy.

A Note from the Wayfarer

In this sacred season, Christian and Muslim alike fast and break bread come evening. This cheesecake, shared across both tables, becomes more than dessert - it is Travel Communion: God discovered in another’s tradition. Lent and Ramadan, different paths, one hunger. When we offer something made with love across faith and culture, we fulfill 1 John 4:12 - “God lives in us.” In every shared slice, He does.

-Bake with love. Serve with grace. -

Adios Amigo

Happy Baking will we meet again!!

Crumble a little and indulge a lot…

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The language of fruit.

It started in a village outside Aleppo, before the world there crumbled into dust and blood. An elderly woman, her hands gnarled like olive wood, had pressed three fresh figs into his palm. She said nothing at first, just held his hands closed around the fruit, her eyes carrying centuries of knowing. Then, in Arabic: “For your journey.”

He bit into one that evening, sitting on a cracked concrete wall while the sunset turned the ruins golden. The sweetness exploded-seeds crunching between his teeth, honey dripping down his wrist, staining his Aid worker badge. It was nothing like the dried discs he’d known from grocery stores back home. This was alive. This was what Eden must have tasted like.

Years later, kneading dough in his small kitchen while the world continued its mad spin without him, he remembered Jesus cursing the barren fig tree in Mark 11:12-14. Not out of spite, but out of sorrow. A fig tree in full leaf should bear fruit. Should. That word haunted him now.

“I had full leaf,” Jonathan whispered to his sourdough starter, its surface bubbling with patient life. The aid work, the credentials, the travelled miles, the meetings with donors and officials’ all full leaf. Impressive from a distance. But where was the fruit? Where were the transformed lives, the lasting change? Where was the sweetness that others could taste?

The fig taught him this: God hungers not for our appearance of productivity, but for actual fruit. The sweetness comes from inside out, from roots deep in living water, from branches that don’t just reach for the sun but transform its light into something others can taste and be nourished by. A fig’s seeds are on the inside, hundreds of them, crunching with potential. You can’t fake that. You can’t manufacture it in a quarterly report.

But figs were only the beginning.

Grapes- the Vine

The vineyard in Georgia-the country, not the state, stretched across hillsides like a prayer shawl, green and ancient and utterly indifferent to his exhaustion. Jonathan had arrived eighteen months into deployment, his faith threadbare, wondering if his work meant anything at all. The refugee crisis was a flood with no ark. The funding dried up faster than hope. His team was fracturing under the weight of impossible need.

The vintner, a man named Giorgi with a face like weathered granite, found him sitting alone in the workers’ cottage. “Come,” he said simply, and Jonathan followed because he had no better ideas.

Giorgi led him to the crushing floor the Satsnakheli, a wooden vat filled with freshly harvested grapes. Traditional method, he explained in broken English. Feet, not machines. “Come,” he said again, pulling off his boots.

Jonathan hesitated, then climbed in.

The sensation was strange and primal-grapes bursting beneath his weight, juice flowing between his toes, the sweet smell rising like incense from a priest’s censer. His feet were stained purple. His soul felt seen. Giorgi laughed at Jonathan’s expression, a sound like distant thunder. “You think wine comes easy? No. No, no. Crushing makes wine. Crushing makes everything good.”

That night, reading by kerosene light, Jonathan found Jesus’s words in John 15:5: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.“ But it was John 12:24 that broke him open like those grapes beneath his feet: “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

The crushing he’d felt-the failed projects, the donors who pulled funding for “more strategic initiatives,” the people he couldn’t save no matter how hard he tried wasn’t the end of the story. It was the process. Wine doesn’t apologize for being made through crushing. It becomes something that brings joy, that celebrates weddings, that Jesus himself chose to represent his blood at the last meal with his friends.

His hands, kneading dough now in his kitchen, remembered the sensation of grapes giving way. Each loaf was a small death of self, a crushing of grain into something that could feed more than just himself. The pressure he’d felt wasn’t punishment. It was transformation. God was making wine, and wine requires the press.

Pomegranates- full of seeds but full of freshness

In Afghanistan, between the crushing and the pressing, between the deployment that broke him and the one that would teach him patience, Jonathan met a farmer with a pomegranate orchard.

The trees looked almost hostile-thorny, twisted, offering no shade in a land that desperately needed it. They seemed to embody the country itself: defensive, wounded, refusing comfort. “Not beautiful trees,” the farmer admitted in Dari, his English translator stumbling over the poetry. “But wait.”

He selected a fruit carefully, felt its weight, then split it open with his knife.

Jonathan gasped. Inside the tough, bitter rind: jewels. Hundreds of arils, each wrapped in translucent ruby flesh, each containing juice and sweetness and life. The complexity was staggering-sweet and tart simultaneously, crunching and bursting, each seed its own small world.

“This is Afghanistan,” the farmer said quietly, no longer smiling. “Everyone sees the hard outside. Only those who break through find the treasure. But breaking through” he gestured at the juice staining both their hands, “breaking through is messy work.”

The pomegranate became Jonathan’s meditation on Psalm 139:14—“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful; I know that full well.” But also, on how we see each other. The hardened refugee with defensive eyes. The suspicious local who wouldn’t meet his gaze. The difficult teammate who criticized every decision. Each one a pomegranate complex, abundant, full of hidden seeds that would spill everywhere if you did the hard work of truly breaking through.

The Jewish high priest wore pomegranates embroidered on his robe in Exodus 28:33-34. Not crowns or eagles or symbols of power pomegranates. A fruit that demands you work for its sweetness, that rewards patience with abundance, that scatters seed everywhere when opened. A fruit that says: what matters is hidden, complex, and worth the effort.

Back in his kitchen, Jonathan learned to crack pomegranates underwater a trick a Syrian friend taught him over tea and tears watching the arils float like rubies while the bitter white pith sank away. How many people had he judged by their rind? How many seeds of potential had he missed because he wouldn’t do the messy work of truly seeing?

The pomegranate taught him that abundance is often hidden behind difficulty. And that some treasures require you to stain your hands.

Dates- looks insignificant

But it was the date palm in Iraq that taught him about time.

The tree stood alone in a bombed-out courtyard, incongruously alive amid the rubble. Sixty years old, the sheikh told him, his voice carrying the weight of what they’d both seen. “My grandfather planted it,” he said, running his hand along the trunk’s rough skin. “He never ate from it. My father barely did. But I eat. My children eat. Their children will eat.”

Jonathan learned that date palms take seven to ten years before they fruit. Sometimes longer. They need scorching heat that would kill lesser trees, roots that go deep where no one sees, and patience that outlives the planter. The sheikh’s grandfather had died in the shade of a tree that gave him nothing but shade. And somehow, that was enough.

Psalm 92:12-14 suddenly made sense in a way it never had in climate-controlled churches: “The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon; planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, ‘The Lord is upright; he is my Rock.’”

The palm doesn’t rush. It doesn’t panic when the first year brings no fruit, or the fifth, or the eighth. It sends roots down deep where no one sees, down to water sources that sustain through drought and bombing and regime change. And when it finally fruits, it fruits abundantly one tree producing up to 300 pounds of dates a year for decades, maybe a century if the wars leave it alone.

This was the opposite of aid work’s obsession with quick wins, quarterly reports, measurable impacts that could be photographed and posted and fundraised upon. This was kingdom work. Plant now, fruit later. Maybe much later. Maybe for someone else’s grandchildren.

The sheikh offered Jonathan dates from his grandfather’s tree. They were impossibly sweet, with a complexity that supermarket dates could never achieve. “Patience makes sweetness,” the sheikh said. “Rushing makes nothing.“

Jonathan’s bread-making became an act of palm-tree faith. The starter he fed daily, never seeing immediate results. The long fermentation that couldn’t be hurried. The slow rise that required waiting while the world screamed for speed. None of it rushed. And people came back, week after week, because things made with patience taste different. They nourish differently. They last.

He would not see all the fruit. Neither did the sheikh’s grandfather. But someone would eat from trees he planted in kitchens and conversations and small acts of faithful crushing.

Olives: The final fruit, the olive, waited for him in Palestine

The olive press was ancient-stone, heavy, relentless as history itself. Jonathan watched as fresh olives went in, beautiful, plump, green with youth and potential. What came out was neither beautiful nor whole. It was oil.

“First press is cold,” the presser explained, his arms slick with the fruit of his labor. “Gentle. Extra virgin. Best quality. After that, we add heat, pressure. Different quality, but still oil. Still useful. Nothing is wasted.”

Someone mentioned that Gethsemane means “oil press.” Jonathan felt the words like a hand on his chest. Jesus prayed there before his crushing in Matthew 26:36-46. He sweat drops of blood their oil of a different kind, pressed out under the weight of what was coming. The garden where God himself was pressed.

The olive taught Jonathan that some things only come through the press. Anointing oil for priests in Exodus 30. Light for the tabernacle in Leviticus 24. Healing for wounds in Luke 10. All pressed out. All requiring the crushing of something whole and beautiful into something more useful than beauty.

He thought of his own pressing—the disillusionment with aid work, the world’s indifference to suffering, the lawmakers’ cruelty dressed up as policy, even the believers who looked away because it was easier than seeing. He’d felt crushed under the weight of it. But perhaps he was being pressed. Perhaps God was making oil.

In Romans 8:28, Paul wrote that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Not that all things are good—Paul wasn’t naive and neither was Jonathan. But that God works in all things. Even the press. Especially the press. Even when you’re in Gethsemane and the weight is so heavy you sweat blood.

Jonathan’s kitchen filled with the smell of rosemary olive oil bread. Each loaf required kneading—pressure, folding, pressing the dough against itself until the gluten developed into something that could hold air and rise. Each loaf emerged transformed, golden, ready to be broken and shared.

The olive doesn’t resist the press. It can’t, really. But in surrendering to it, it becomes something that brings light to darkness, healing to wounds, anointing to the called. Three things the world desperately needed. Three things that only come through crushing.

Epilogue: The Harvest

Jonathan’s kitchen wasn’t much. No deployments, no title, no quarterly reports proving impact. Just flour and water and salt and time.

But on his counter sat five small bowls: dried figs, raisins, pomegranate seeds, dates, and olives. Five fruits from five journeys. Five teachers from five pressings.

A knock at the door. A neighbor. “I smelled bread.”

Jonathan smiled, pulling a loaf from the oven studded with figs and walnuts, brushed with olive oil. “Come in,” he said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

Because this is what fruit does. It doesn’t shout about its fruitfulness. It doesn’t measure its impact. It simply offers itself, sweetness pressed from crushing, abundance hidden in hard rinds, patience rewarded in shade for future generations.

The world was still crumbling, still self-centered, still led by crazy lawmakers. But in this kitchen, five fruits taught their lessons on repeat. And slowly, quietly, one loaf at a time, Jonathan the Wayfarer learned to bear fruit that would last (John 15:16).

Not because the world deserved it. But because he’d been pressed, crushed, planted, and tended by hands that knew exactly what they were doing.

And the harvest, though hidden, was more abundant than he could ask or imagine.

Crumbs-n-Wonders is a reader supported publication, with regular short devotional stories being shared at regular intervals. These stories are lifetime experiences of the author and former aid worker- some his own and some related by friend and colleagues. To receive new post and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Jonathan had always been a man who noticed things others walked past.

He noticed the way morning light hit a tin roof in a Sudanese camp differently than it hit the stained glass of his childhood church back home. He noticed how hunger looked the same on every face, regardless of the language the lips around it spoke. And he noticed with a quiet wonder that had been growing in him since boyhood - how, in the great turning wheel of the calendar, two of humanity’s most ancient seasons of the soul so often arrived together, like old friends who had never been formally introduced but somehow always found themselves at the same crossroads.

Ash Wednesday and Ramadan.

He had seen it first as a small boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, kneeling beside his grandfather in an old Portuguese stone church somewhere along Konkan costal countryside where the salt wind off the Arabian Sea crept through the cracks in the walls and the smell of incense had soaked so deep into the old Portuguese stonework that it seemed to bleed out of the very rock itself. The priest’s thumb pressed cold ash against his smooth forehead, and the words fell like stones into still waters: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” He did not fully understand then. But the feeling of it, the weight, the solemnity, the strange tenderness of being told he was fragile that he never forgot. It planted something in him. A seed that would not bloom until he had walked very long and very dusty roads.

Jonathan became an aid worker in his early thirties, almost by accident or perhaps by appointment, as he would come to believe. He ran into his first refugee camp in Central Aisa with a clipboard and clean boots, and he ran out of his hundredth with cracked hands and a heart broken open in precisely the right places.

The Road That Taught Him to Read the Ashes

It was in a camp somewhere on Sudanese border, during what must have been his fifteenth or sixteenth year in the field, that Ash Wednesday and Ramadan arrived together in a way Jonathan could not simply file away as coincidence.

The camp was vast and exhausted. Tens of thousands of people lived there in a city of plastic sheeting and borrowed time. The population was extraordinarily mixed-Christian families from the south, Muslim families from the east, and every shade of human story in between. The morning Jonathan arrived, a Wednesday in late February, he had ash on his forehead. He had attended a small, makeshift Ash Wednesday service held by a Jesuit priest Monsignor Greg, who travelled these camps like a pilgrim, carrying a small pot of palm ash and an enormous gentleness. Well, if I could picture him for you here, I would have says Jonathan with a faint smile.

The ash was still visible on Jonathan’s brow when he sat down with a group of Muslim community leaders to discuss the water distribution schedule for the coming month. One of them, an elder named Ibrahim, a man with eyes the colour of deep river water and a beard touched by silver looked at Jonathan’s forehead for a long moment.

“Today is your beginning?” Ibrahim asked softly in French.

“Lent,” Jonathan said, nodding. “Forty days.”

Ibrahim smiled slowly. “Tonight,” he said, “we watch for the moon.”

They looked at each other across a folding table covered in logistics papers, two men from two worlds, and something passed between them that no document could record.

That night, Jonathan sat outside his tent and watched the crescent moon emerge from the blue-black sky over the Sahel, thin and silver as a whisper. From somewhere in the camp, a voice rose in the Azaan, the call to the first Tarawih, prayer of Ramadan. And in a nearby tarpaulin shelter, he could hear the Jesuit priest quietly leading a small group of Christians through the opening evening of Lent, reading from the Gospel of Matthew 6:16-18 “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites… your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

Jonathan sat between both sounds and wept, though he could not have said precisely why. He would spend decades trying to find the words.

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What Paul Knew About the Dust

Jonathan had carried a battered copy of Paul’s letters for most of his adult life. Not because he was a theologian, he was emphatically not but because Paul was, above all things, a traveler. A man of roads. A man who had been knocked flat in the dust and risen with his eyes rearranged. Jonathan felt kinship with that as he called himself a wayfarer. But he never ever tried to equate himself to that great man of God, Paul.

It was in Paul’s second letter to the 2 Corinthians 4:7 that Jonathan found what he came to call the heartbeat of Ash Wednesday. “We have this treasure in jars of clay,” Paul wrote, “to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

Jars of clay. Dust shaped into vessels.

Jonathan thought about that phrase in every camp he ever entered. He thought about it when he carried water with women whose arms were stronger than anything he’d ever known. He thought about it when he sat with men who had lost everything and still offered him their last cup of tea. These were jars of clay - cracked, worn, battered by unimaginable weight and yet the light that came through them was blinding.

Ash Wednesday, Jonathan came to understand, was never really about guilt or gloom or the performance of religious theatre. It was about something far more radical. It was the annual, voluntary act of telling the truth about oneself. The priest’s thumb pressing ash to the brow was the Church whispering what the camps had been shouting at Jonathan for years: you are not the source of your own light. You are a vessel. You are temporary. And that is not a tragedy that is the beginning of wisdom.

Paul understood this with the particular clarity of a man who had once been magnificently wrong. Before the road to Damascus, Paul had been armored in certainty, in religious superiority, in the unshakeable confidence of a man who believed his dust did not smell like dust at all. The encounter that knocked him from his horse was not a punishment. It was mercy. It was God removing the armor so that Paul could finally feel the wind.

“I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul wrote to the Galatians 2:20. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

This was the mystery at the center of Lent: the strange arithmetic of the Kingdom, where the way up is always down, where the way to fullness is always through emptiness, where the ashes on the forehead are not a mark of shame but a mark of extraordinary belonging -“to the earth, to each other, to whatever it is that breathes life into dust and calls it beloved”.

What Ibrahim Taught Jonathan About Fasting

As the years accumulated, and he travelled around, Jonathan found himself watching the Muslim communities in the camps with something that deepened from respect into a kind of reverent awe during Ramadan.

He had worked alongside Ibrahim’s community for many seasons (with breaks in between deployments of course), and Ibrahim had become something of an elder brother to his soul. One evening, deep into a particularly hard Ramadan and the camp was overcrowded, the food supplies were stretched, and actual fasting was a luxury many families could not observe because they were already hungry. Jonathan asked Ibrahim how one fasted when one had nothing to eat anyway.

Ibrahim was quiet for a long time.

“The fast,” he said finally, “is not about the stomach. It is about the remembering.” He touched his chest. “In here. All day, every time I feel the hunger, I remember. I remember who I am. I remember who gave me breath. I remember those who have less than me. The hunger is the teacher. The hunger keeps me awake.”

Jonathan sat with that for a long time.

He thought about Paul again: “I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound.”[ Philippians 4:11-12] Contentment, in Paul’s grammar, was not a natural disposition. It was a learned discipline. The word Paul used in Greek is autarkes and it carried the sense of a self-sufficiency that was paradoxically rooted not in the self at all, but in the One who strengthened him. It was the peace that passed understanding, available only to those who had first sat long enough in the not-understanding.

Ramadan, Jonathan slowly grasped, was Islam’s great communal curriculum in exactly this discipline. Thirty days of voluntary vulnerability. Thirty days of letting the body’s ordinary insistence on comfort be quieted, so that something deeper could be heard. The pre-dawn meal of ‘Sehri’ eaten in the dark. The evening call to ‘Iftari’ that broke the fast not in isolation but in community, the shared dates, the shared water, sometimes even the shared Rooafhza milk- milk sweetened with a mild rose flavored syrup and the shared prayer. It was profoundly, achingly social. It was the ummah, the community learning again together that human beings are creatures of need, and that need, honestly acknowledged, is the very doorway through which mercy enters.

“We are dust,” the Christian rite says.

“We are in need of You,” the Muslim heart prays.

Jonathan heard both as the same sentence.

The Night They Prayed Together Without Praying Together

There was one night during one of his deployments to this camp many years back that I believe Jonathan would carry to his grave.

It was the third week of a Ramadan that had coincided almost entirely with Lent, in a camp where a cholera outbreak had swept through a section of the settlement with terrifying speed. The medical team was overwhelmed. The morgue tent was filling. Children who had been alive at breakfast were gone by evening. The kind of grief that descends on a place like that is not like ordinary sorrow; it is a weight in the air itself, something you breathe in with every breath.

That night, long after midnight, Jonathan found himself sitting on an overturned water container at the edge of the medical tent, too tired to move, too broken to do anything but exist. After a few minutes, Ibrahim came and sat beside him. Neither man spoke for a very long time.

Ibrahim was fasting. Jonathan had not eaten since a hasty Lenten meal of soup at noon. Both men were, in their own way, sitting in the posture their faiths had asked of them - emptied, quieted, held open.

After a while, Ibrahim began to pray quietly in Arabic. Jonathan did not understand the words, but he knew the sound. It was the sound of a man speaking to Someone he trusted absolutely, even in the wreckage.

When Ibrahim finished, Jonathan bowed his head and prayed silently, the kind of prayer that has no words, only weight, only the breath-by-breath act of holding on to the One who holds.

When Jonathan lifted his head, Ibrahim was looking at him.

“He hears both of us,” Ibrahim said simply.

Jonathan nodded. “I believe that.”

They sat together until dawn began to lighten the east. And when the first call to Fajr prayer rose over the camp, Jonathan felt he could not explain this, could not have defended it in any theology seminar, that the sound was beautiful. That it was meant to be heard. That there was something in the universe that was glad two tired men had sat together in the dark and refused to let go.

What This Tells Humanity Today

Jonathan is older now, nearing his sixties. His boots have crossed more borders than he can count. His hair has gone silver, like Ibrahim’s beard. Although he no longer carries his battered Paul in a pocket that has been re-sewn so many times the stitching has stitching, but he does carry its aroma, its essence deep down in his heart where ever he goes.

And every year, when Ash Wednesday approaches, he watches the news and the night sky with the same question burning in him: Will the crescent come this year too? Will the two seasons walk together again?

When they do, he believes something is being demonstrated that humanity needs to see with great urgency.

Because here is what the camps taught him that no classroom ever could: the divisions that feel eternal from a distance dissolve with startling speed when people are standing in the same dust. When a mother is weeping over the same fever whether she is praying toward Mecca or toward Jerusalem. Because in camps we see people of both faith / religions living side by side many a times. When hunger levels or flattens down the constructed hierarchies that seem so solid from the comfortable distance of ideology.

Both Ash Wednesday and Ramadan are, at their truest, seasons of subtraction. They ask their practitioners to set down voluntarily, lovingly, deliberately the things that usually insulate human beings from the truth of their own fragility. The food. The distraction. The performance. The armor. And in that collective setting-down, something remarkable becomes possible: people can actually see each other.

Paul wrote to a church in Rome that was tearing itself apart along cultural and ethnic lines- Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians who could barely sit at the same table. His plea was not for a shallow unity that erased difference, but for a deeper recognition that shook every hierarchy at its root: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[ Galatians 3:28] The radical claim was not that differences did not exist. It was that they did not define the fundamental reality of the human person before God.

Ibrahim would have nodded at that, Jonathan believes. Because the Quran’s great declaration - “O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another”[Surah Al-Hujurat (49:13)], is not a charter for homogeneity either. It is an invitation. Difference is not the problem. Difference is the design. The knowing-one-another is the purpose.

What threatens humanity today is not the fact of religious difference. It is the weaponization of it. The deliberate, cynical, politically profitable use of faith’s external forms to build walls where the faiths themselves, at their deepest waters, insist on bridges.

When the crescent and the ashes share the same calendar page, the universe seems to be offering humanity a demonstration that it keeps offering and that humanity keeps struggling to receive: that longing for God, that willingness to be vulnerable before the sacred, that communal act of saying “we are not self-sufficient, we are not the source of our own meaning” , you know what, this is not a Muslim thing or a Christian thing.., says Jonathan.

It is a human thing.

It is the most human thing.

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Our family, my dear wife Sarah and my two sons, Caleb and Ethan had joined me for three months. Resources were scarce, and fresh vegetables nearly impossible to find. The camp’s dusty rows of tents stretched endlessly under a relentless sun, and hope seemed as scarce as the food.

Then came Easter week. A local farmer, hearing about our work, appeared at the camp gates with crates of fresh spring produce: tender spinach, asparagus, radishes, and wild strawberries from his fields. “For the children,” he said simply in broken English, “New life.”

Sarah gathered refugee women that afternoon, and together they created something miraculous-spring salads for hundreds. I watched Caleb and Ethan help wash the greens alongside Syrian children who’d forgotten what fresh vegetables tasted like. The camp’s communal area transformed as families gathered around simple bowls of crisp, colorful abundance.

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An elderly Syrian grandmother named Amira approached me, tears streaming down her weathered face. Through our translator, she whispered, “I thought I’d never taste spring again. I thought everything beautiful had died.” She held up a radish, examining its pink-white brilliance. “But look, it grew. While we suffered, somewhere this small thing was pushing through soil, reaching for sun. God didn’t forget about radishes. Maybe He hasn’t forgotten about us.”

Her words pierced my heart. Romans 8:11 suddenly came alive: “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Spring salads, those tender greens, crisp vegetables, bright strawberries they’re not just nutrition. They’re testimonies of resurrection. Every spring, while winter’s death grip seems permanent, life is secretly stirring beneath frozen ground. Seeds split open in darkness, pushing toward light they cannot yet see, trusting in a promise encoded in their very DNA.

That evening, as our family shared our own bowl of spring salad in our tent, Caleb asked, “Papa, why does this taste like hope?”

I looked at those fresh greens, each leaf a small miracle of renewal, and understood. Spring salads remind us that God specializes in resurrections-in gardens, in seasons, in hearts. They whisper that even when everything appears dead, God is preparing new life beneath the surface.

Years later, back home, Sarah still makes spring salads every Easter season. We remember Amira, that farmer’s generosity, and how God used simple vegetables to preach the gospel of renewal to a camp full of people who desperately needed to believe in new beginnings.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

February 2019. Eastern Europe. The kind of cold that makes your breath freeze mid-air and your hope feel equally crystallized. I’d been deployed to a remote village where temperatures plunged to minus forty, and our family had accompanied me for what would become the longest winter of our lives.

The assignment was meant to be six weeks. It stretched to four months when border closures trapped us. Our supplies dwindled. Sarah grew dejected. Caleb, now thirteen, stopped speaking for days at a time. Ethan, eleven, cried himself to sleep. And I, I questioned everything. My calling. My faith. My decision to drag my family into this frozen wasteland.

“There’s nothing green here, Papa,” Ethan whispered one night. “Everything’s dead.”

He was right. Snow buried everything. Darkness dominated, the sun barely clearing the horizon for three hours daily. The village of Ovidiu, itself seemed lifeless, its people moving like shadows through the perpetual twilight.

Then I met Nikolai, a weathered farmer who’d survived seventy such winters. He invited us to his home, a small, warm cottage that smelled of earth and bread. What he served changed everything.

A winter salad. But not delicate spring greens or colorful summer vegetables. This was substantial, almost defiant-Massaged kale (dark, hardy, grown in his greenhouse), roasted beets (deep purple, stored in his root cellar since autumn), orange segments (brought by traders), walnuts (gathered months ago), shaved Brussels sprouts (still clinging to frozen stalks in his garden), crumbled cheese, and quinoa.

“This,” Nikolai said in halting English, “is winter’s truth. The deepest provision comes from the darkest season.”

He held up the kale. “This grows in snow. Becomes sweeter after frost. Winter doesn’t kill it but winter perfects it”.

Then the beets. “These lived underground all autumn, storing sunlight in their flesh. In deepest winter, they give back the sun they absorbed in warmth. They remembered summer for us.”

The orange. “Someone carried this across frozen roads to reach us. In our darkest season, connection sustained us.”

He pointed to the walnuts. “We gathered these before winter came. Provision made in light sustains us through darkness. What we stored in faith, we eat in trial.”

Sarah was crying. Not from sadness anymore, but recognition.

Nikolai continued, “Winter salad teaches what summer salad cannot. Summer says, ‘See how easy abundance is!’ But winter says, ‘See how deep My faithfulness goes. Even here. Even now. Especially now.’”

He opened his worn Russian Bible to Psalm 23:5 “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.”

“Winter is the enemy,” he said quietly. “Darkness. Cold. Death. And yet, look at this table. God prepares feast in the presence of our deepest winter. Not after winter ends, but during it.”

That night, our family sat in Nikolai’s cottage, eating winter salad by candlelight. And I understood something profound: winter foods are not lesser provisions; they’re specialized nourishment designed for the soul’s harshest seasons.

The hearty kale that withstands frost. The stored beets that remember sunshine. The quinoa that provides complete protein when strength fails. The citrus that prevents scurvy in darkness. Every ingredient was purposeful, designed for survival and sustenance when everything else fails.

“Papa,” Caleb said, it was his first words in a week. “God knew we’d need this kind of food. Not just for winter, but for winters in our hearts.”

Yes. Exactly.

Winter salads teach us that God’s provision in our darkest seasons isn’t accidental or inferior, it’s precisely calibrated for survival. When life feels frozen, when hope seems buried under snow, when darkness dominates, that’s when we need to understand that God hasn’t abandoned the table. He’s prepared a different feast; one designed specifically for endurance.

The Kale of His Word, sweetened by trials. The stored sunshine of past faithfulness, sustaining us when we can’t feel His warmth. The connections of community carried across frozen distances. The provisions gathered in faith during better seasons.

We returned home in late March. Now, every winter, Sarah makes what we call “Nikolai’s Winter Salad”, -massaged kale, roasted beets, oranges, and quinoa. We serve it during our family’s hardest moments, not just in seasonal winter, but in life’s winters too.

Because winter salad whispers the gospel’s deepest truth: “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18).

In our coldest, darkest seasons, when nothing seems to grow and death appears to reign, there, especially there, God prepares a table. Hearty. Nourishing. Exactly what we need to survive until spring.

Sarah had fallen ill with altitude sickness, and our children, Caleb and Ethan, were struggling with the isolation. I felt like a failure, unable to help my wife, comfort my children, or adequately prepare the village for the brutal months ahead.

One evening, an elderly village woman named Devi invited us to her home. Her husband had died the previous winter, and she lived alone in a stone cottage surrounded by a magnificent garden. Despite her loss and scanty resources, she welcomed us with a feast centered around an autumn salad unlike anything I’d ever seen.

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Roasted butternut squash, still warm from her clay oven. Kale from her garden, massaged tender with oil. Dried cranberries she’d preserved. Walnuts from her single tree. Sliced apples, their sweetness concentrated by cool nights. She’d even found pomegranate seeds, something very rare and precious at that altitude.

As we ate, Devi spoke through our translator. “This salad is my thanksgiving. Each ingredient tells a story of letting go.”

She held up a piece of squash. “The vine released this to me. It could have held on, but it knew, only in releasing can there be harvest.”

Then a walnut. “The tree let go of these gifts. They fell, and I gathered them. If the tree clutched its fruit, both tree and fruit would die.”

Her weathered hands lifted an apple slice. “The branch released this. And look,” she pointed to her window, where we could see her bare apple tree against the sunset. “The tree looks dead now, doesn’t it? Naked. Vulnerable. But it’s not dead, it’s trusting. It let go so it can survive winter and bloom again.”

Ethan, our younger lad usually quiet, asked, “Doesn’t the tree miss its apples?”

Devi smiled, tears glistening. “Perhaps. Like I miss my husband. But missing something and being destroyed by its absence are different things. The tree grieves its fruit but trusts the rhythm. Autumn teaches us-we must release what we love so that life can continue.”

She looked at Sarah, still pale and weak. “You are afraid,” Devi said gently. “You clutch your plans, your health, your control. But autumn says: let go. Trust the One who creates seasons.”

That night, 1 Thessalonians 5:18 echoed in my spirit: “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” Not give thanks for all circumstances, but in them. Even in the season of letting go.

Devi’s autumn salad became our family’s tradition. Every fall, Sarah roasts butternut squash and tosses it with kale, cranberries, and walnuts. We call it our “Letting Go Salad.”

Because autumn’s spiritual lesson is profound: gratitude isn’t just for abundance, it’s for the wisdom of seasons. The falling leaves aren’t dying in vain; they’re feeding the soil for spring’s renewal. The harvested squash isn’t the garden’s end; it’s provision that sustains through winter. I recall my childhood when the caretake at my grandpa’s home would harvest all the squash and store them in the underground basement cellar to be utilized during the winter months for days when there was no other seasonal vegetable. The bare branches of the apple tree or as a matter of fact any tree aren’t abandoned; they’re resting in trust.

Autumn salads, with their rich, warming ingredients, teach us that even in seasons of release-releasing health, dreams, loved ones, certainty, we can still gather gratitude. We can still feast. We can still trust that the God who designed autumn’s letting go also designed spring’s return.

Years later, I learned that Devi passed away the following winter. But her garden? It bloomed magnificently that next spring, tended by village children she’d taught to plant, to harvest, and to let go.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens... a time to plant and a time to uproot” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2). And in every season, even autumn’s release, there is provision for gratitude.

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