Take my hand. Step away from the world for a few minutes and walk with me into the garden.

Breathe deeply. Be filled.

*Music by Andrew Nelson

First, a chicken egg gets fertilized when sperm from a rooster meets the hen’s yolk inside her reproductive tract, before the hard shell forms.

Chickens do not mate like mammals. There is no candlelight. No Frank Sinatra. No courtship dinner at a nice Italian restaurant.

No.

They do a quick little touch of their vent openings. It is called a “cloacal kiss.” (I did not make that up.) My very proud adopted rooster, RuPaul, is extremely fond of these special “kisses.”

My queen of a rooster carries on with much smootching around the yard, in broad daylight, with absolutely zero discretion. You should know this. Because the hen stores the rooster’s sperm in special glands in her oviduct, where it can remain alive and healthy for up to three weeks.

Three weeks (Google it. It’s true.).

Which means one little kiss can fertilize many eggs over the course of several weeks.

This is either a remarkable feat of reproductive efficiency or an absolutely horrifying arrangement, depending on your perspective. Reader, we’re going with “horrifying arrangement.”

Fertilized eggs, however, will not actually turn into chicks unless a hen gets all maternal and decides to sacrifice everything fun in her life in order to sit on them. This is called “incubation.” The factory farms that raised the chicken on your table do this inside big incubation chambers to simulate a mother’s warmth and protection. (The factory farms also take the “reproductive efficiency” perspective.)

We do not want the ladies sitting on them. Because we have enough problems. But sit she will. She will sit there with grim determination. This is why you are supposed to remove the eggs from the nesting boxes every day or two. So the eggs stay… eggs.

Second thing to know is that chicken eggs come out of the hen with a protective coating on them. This coating keeps bacteria and other unpleasantness from getting through the shell, allowing freshly laid eggs to remain safe outside the refrigerator.

Once you wash an egg, however, the protective coating is gone and it needs to be refrigerated. This is where my highly sophisticated egg-management system comes in.

I generally keep the eggs in a basket on the kitchen counter until I have room in the refrigerator. Then I wash them and perform what is known as the “float test.”

If an egg floats, it has somehow gone rotten. It gets thrown away. If it sinks all the way to the bottom, it is good. Into the carton it goes. If it wobbles around somewhere in the murky middle depths, unable to make up its mind in a timely fashion, I throw it away. I have no patience for indecisive eggs.

Now that we have discussed these two things, you will understand the story I am about to tell you.

Last week, Bryan and I woke up and discovered that one corner of the kitchen smelled like dead animal. Not “something might be getting a little ripe” dead animal. I mean dead animal.

Well, we have an indoor/outdoor cat, so naturally I assumed she must have caught a mouse outside and dragged it into the house.

Reader. I tore that kitchen apart. I emptied every storage shelf. I looked behind appliances. I checked under furniture. I peeked inside the shoes on the rack by the door. I began dismantling things.

At one point I removed the covers from the baseboard heaters because I had developed a theory that the mouse had not actually been dead when the cat dragged it inside.

Perhaps, I reasoned, it had escaped. Perhaps it had crawled into the radiator to hide. Perhaps it had then died slowly of an infection that began with gangrene resulting from a leg wound sustained during the initial feline attack. This is the level of forensic detail my brain was producing at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday.

After approximately three hours of turning my kitchen upside down, my eye finally landed on the basket of eggs sitting innocently on the far side of the counter. And there it was. One egg had exploded. Which, in retrospect, was a fairly strong indication that it would not have passed the float test. The protective barrier had been bridged.

But the smell was wrong. This was not rotten-egg smell. This was dead-animal smell.

I cautiously approached. There was, in fact, a dead animal. It was not a mouse. It was a full-term baby chick carcass curled up inside the egg. And it was decomposing and disgusting.

Reader, I gagged as I grabbed the entire basket, ran out to the back field and disposed of everything in it while Bryan put on a hazmat suit and cleaned up the natural disaster on the countertop.

There are moments in marriage when one person discovers that the other person is absolutely the right person for them. This was one of those moments. Romance is not dead. Although, to be fair, something else was.

I have been unable to eat an egg since. I can barely look at an egg. Eggs have become sinister to me. I stare at them now and wonder as my eyes narrow, “What are you hiding?”

Eating developed chicken embryos that are still inside their eggs is considered a delicacy in some cultures. These are called “baluts.” I suppose it would be like chicken salad with both egg and bits of chicken in it (but with the horrifying addition of some fur as well). Reader. This is not a delicacy in mine. In my culture, plain unfertilized eggs are fried for breakfast or boiled for a snack. They are not supposed to contain furry surprises.

RuPaul, for his part, has shown zero remorse. He continues strutting around the yard, preening his magnificent feathers, looking for his next romantic encounter. And while I have grown to love him, I’m also struggling about whether or not I can keep him. He has really messed up the whole situation with the ladies of the hen house and their eggs.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should purchase my eggs from the grocery store from now on. A reasonable thought, all things considered.

But then I have to admit, when I look at those pristine white grocery-store eggs sitting all tidy in their carton, I now have only one thought…

Trust no egg. I shut the fridge door and pass on the eggs altogether.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

And that perhaps the great minds of the world are simply too occupied to be still long enough to sit, listen, and absorb the undoing. Within these blooms there is perhaps an unraveling of what we thought we knew.

Some mysteries can’t be solved like puzzles, because they can only be known by bearing witness to a slow and astonishing unveiling as all the folds of their skin part and open.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

One day, the surface is soft and smooth as butter, a perfect calm. The next, waves slam into the shore and the wind lashes sand against my skin.

But somewhere in the way down deep, in the innermost places of the lake there is a calm and a quiet that holds her. No matter what forces bring calamity or calm to the surface, an inner peace remains in the depths of her interior.

And may it be so, and may it be so, and may it be so for us all.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

Between the two of us, Bryan and I have been leading group trips and pilgrimages for several years. This will be our second time leading a pilgrimage together on the Scottish Isle of Iona. The sacred Isle of Iona has long been considered a thin place, that is, a place where the veil between heaven and earth is tissue paper thin.

You’re invited to join us in this beautiful pastoral landscape for a contemplative pilgrimage in June of 2027. Prior to our time on Iona we’ll have gatherings virtually to prepare you for an immersive experience on the island.

Registration is open! Space is limited, and reservations will be on a first come first served basis.

If you’re interested in receiving additional information and details, please reach out to me at christyberghoef@gmail.com.

But lately I feel very differently. Lately I’m feeling our collective power. I’ve been so inspired witnessing people who are getting out there, joining hands, speaking truth plainly, and giving birth to creative goodness in the midst of the growing chaos. It keeps my chin up. It keeps me afloat. It keeps me grounded. It keeps me whole and hopeful.

It inspires me to pay attention to the world’s darkness without letting it consume me. And it inspires me to work at being light in the spaces I inhabit.

We each get to choose what kind of presence we will embody in this world, in this moment. The way we treat one another in the midst of this mess tells the world what (or who) we serve, far more than our words ever can. Our actions reveal something about our guiding principles, our moral standards, and our vision for humanity. It’s as simple (and as complicated) as that.

There will always be unimaginable evil in this world. And there will always be incomprehensible beauty. There is much to lament. There is much to celebrate. This is the complicated reality of being alive.

So, if you’re able, don’t run away from the darkness. Link arms and run straight into it. (Not everyone can do this, I realize. Some people are so bent over by hardship and burden right now it takes everything in them to just keep on breathing).

Carry a torch in one hand so you can see where you’re going. And carry a sack of seeds in the other hand. Scatter the seeds of what you wish to see growing in the world. They will germinate in the darkness as if the evil is a womb out of which something new can be born. Tend to them. Nurture them. Protect their fragile beginnings.

Reader, we cannot even begin to imagine the kind of future that we can give birth to if each of us commits ourselves to the planting.

The world is ugly. The world is beautiful. Do not be afraid.

This is a tale as old as time, and sometimes we forget that together we can shape the narrative for what comes next.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

In nature, disease spreads through networks. Once a toxic fungus infects a forest, it doesn’t have to kill every tree. It only has to keep moving.

Lies work much the same way.

In my Christian tradition, slander is the act of speaking false, malicious, or damaging words about another person with the intent of destroying their reputation. It goes beyond gossip. It is the deliberate weaponization of words to create division, distrust, and harm.

Political campaigns have long spent staggering amounts of money hiring consultants whose sole job is to craft emotionally compelling narratives. Some of those narratives are truthful. Many are misleading. And many more are blatantly false. When those messages are repeated often enough, they begin to sound like common knowledge.

Scripture has remarkably little patience for this. God detests slander. Slander is a sin.

Yet every election season, millions of dollars are poured into propaganda machines, funded by powerful corporate donors, designed to spread false narratives with the explicit goal of creating distrust or even disgust toward an opposing candidate. Like the toxic fungus in a forest, those talking points then trickle down into our neighborhoods, churches, workplaces, our attitudes, and around our dinner tables. Some people repeat them knowingly. Others do so because they trusted the voices that first spoke them.

I’ve been appalled by some of the false claims being made about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. The rhetoric has become so reckless and nauseating that reading comment sections often feels like watching a public stoning and wanting a vomit bag next to me. Even self-professed Christian leaders are eagerly participating in the slander.

So let’s speak in facts, because truth matters more than winning, right?

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed identifies as a capitalist, not a socialist. He advocates for a market economy while arguing that capitalism functions best when monopolies are prevented, competition is protected, and government ensures that markets remain fair rather than captured by corporate power (fun fact: our founding fathers believed monopolies would be a major threat to liberty and even discussed the possibility of banning them in the Bill of Rights).

Dr. El-Sayed supports progressive policies, including Medicare for All, stronger oversight of large corporations, and reducing the influence of corporate money in politics.

Supporting universal health care does not, by itself, make someone a socialist or a communist. Just as supporting public schools, public roads, public libraries, Medicare, or Social Security does not make one a socialist or a communist.

Our health care system is at a point of crisis. The United States spends more on health care than any other developed nation, yet consistently produces poorer health outcomes than many of its peers. When increasing the bottom line is the primary thing of concern, care for people becomes secondary. We are the only developed nation on the planet that does not offer its citizens health care as a basic human right. Too often, the financial interests of insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations exert enormous influence over public policy, which has had a big hand in leading to the absurd health care crises we’re in.

Most people I know (regardless of their partisan affiliation) have a health care horror story about themselves or a loved one, to share. This is a crises that will touch everyone at some point in their lives. The influence of corporate money on our health care policies should concern all of us, regardless of party.

When it comes to the corrupting influence of money in politics, sometimes I wonder whether we’ve developed something resembling Stockholm Syndrome, which is a tendency to defend systems that continually fail us because we’ve forgotten they could be different. That’s how absurd this all looks to many people outside our country who look on shaking their heads, wondering why we keep voting to harm ourselves with so many inhumane policies that lack common sense for the common good.

Why do we keep rewarding politicians who serve wealthy donors before ordinary citizens? How have we become so accustomed to corporate influence that we barely notice it anymore? Why do we continue voting for leaders who refuse to actually take on this increasingly corruptive aspect of democracy that is infiltrating nearly every issue that passes through Congress?

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve simply lost our imagination for how our society could be. Awakening often begins with a snap of the fingers. And sometimes it begins with a brave person willing to stand up and say, “Enough.”

Whatever you think of Dr. El-Sayed’s policies, he is forcing a conversation that too many politicians have avoided for decades. He is asking that fundamental question, “Who is our government actually serving?”

Who. Is. Our. Government. Actually. Serving?

Our founders envisioned representatives accountable to the people. Today, a growing number of Americans across the political spectrum are beginning to be aware of the ways enormous sums of money have distorted those incentives. It is a conversation worth having honestly.

You can imagine the level of slanderous attacks that are about to be unleashed on a candidate whose campaign, at its heart, is about taking the reigns of democratic power away from the clutches of a handful of greedy, controlling corporate fists and putting it into the hands of hard-working everyday Americans, where it rightly belongs.

And this brings me back to slander…

One of the things I deeply appreciate about Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is that all three traditions regard malicious falsehood as morally corrosive. They share a conviction that truthfulness is sacred and that bearing false witness against another person is a detestable offense against God.

To be clear, neither political party has clean hands. Slander has become so routine that we’ve largely stopped being shocked by it at all. We’ve come to accept political behavior that our own religious traditions plainly condemn.

I can’t help but think as this election heats up, that the world is watching us. Our neighbors are watching. Our children are watching too.

And I wonder, can we disagree passionately without lying? Can we criticize policies without destroying people by misrepresenting them? Can we make truth more important than victory? Can we make slander wrong again?

I’m being serious. If you think that only citizens who have deep pockets ought to be able to go to the doctor to be treated, then just say that, don’t label the candidate who believes every human deserves access to healthcare a “socialist.” If you are fine with corporations controlling politicians and influencing policy to their advantage, just say so. Don’t call the candidate who finds this morally reprehensible a “communist.” Let’s at least speak in facts. You can disagree with the ideas and give your reasons why without slandering the one who has a different vision than you.

One more thing. When I witness people slandering Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a man who has a vision for this country that cuts through the chaos, those lying tongues say more about the one speaking them and the God that person serves than they say about Abdul El-Sayed and the God he serves.

The constant marvel of it was so immense and impossible it was hard to know if I was dreaming or awake. Hard to know if my bottom lip was trembling from a chill in the air or from holding back tears of wonder.

Eventually we made our way back to Michigan through the stunning provinces of Canada. Every province was undeniable stunning, but the Yukon stole the breath right out of my body. The beauty... the sparse human population... the sheer immensity... the clarity of everything - water, wind, forest & mountain air (all of which seemed to cleanse me to).

It left me speechless. It sharpened my senses and evoked a wonder so deep I couldn’t help but to exhale gratitude from all the inhalation of it.

That we mere mortals get to share a planet with majesty such as this leaves me trembling. Humbled. Dumbstruck and on my knees.

This is the remarkable ordinary.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

A couple months ago, RuPaul was attacked by my niece’s wildly enthusiastic, overachieving little puppy. The injuries were about fifty percent cosmetic and fifty percent to his ego. He lost his magnificent tail feathers. His regal crown. The fabulous plumage that distinguished him from the common hens.

As his tail feathers slowly grew back, his confidence also began growing back. No longer content to simply exist among the flock, he began making increasingly aggressive bids for the top of the pecking order. He puffed. He strutted. He chest-bumped. He crowed with the confidence of a bird who had clearly forgotten he had recently been humiliated by a twelve pound puppy.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I sat down at the table in the Secret Garden with a cup of tea when RuPaul casually hopped onto the table and stared directly into my soul. He was ot staring at me. He was staring through me. I can say with clarity that this was a turning point in our relationship. I shooshed him off the table and carried on with my tea.

Then, two days ago… things escalated. I was working on a project in the garage. I stepped into the house for all of fifteen seconds to grab a measuring tape off the kitchen counter. When I turned around... there he stood, in my kitchen, flexing his talons.

Reader, he was standing in my kitchen. In. My. Kitchen.

Now, I realize he may have interpreted the open door as an invitation.

“Why yes, Christy, I would love to come in for tea. Perhaps we could discuss your leadership of the flock.”

I attempted to escort him politely back outside. RuPaul declined. Instead, we embarked on a highly competitive game of Chase the Rooster Around the Kitchen Island. At several points it became genuinely unclear who was pursuing whom.

I was desperately trying to keep him from making a break for the bedrooms or, God help us all, the basement. Because once a rooster establishes residency in your basement, I’m pretty sure some kind of squatter’s rights kick in.

And then, because I had left the back door standing open during our territorial negotiation, Ginger and Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided they, too, had been invited. Suddenly I had three chickens in my house. Three!

The ladies, being considerably more reasonable than their self-appointed king, came running when I called. They happily leapt into my arms, allowing me to carry them outside with minimal diplomatic effort.

RuPaul, however, was still holding his ground. We locked eyes. This was no longer just about the inappropriateness of him being in my kitchen. This was about territory. About authority. About who, exactly, was in charge of this homestead.

Fortunately, the ladies provided the perfect distraction. The moment His Royal Highness glanced in their direction, I seized my opportunity, cornered him, and gently but firmly ushered him back outdoors.

I could hear him huffing over his shoulder as his tail feathers pompously perked up.

I’m quite certain he’s already planning his return.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

Plants. Flowers. Green things growing. Persistently insisting on being fabulously alive. “How do they do this?” I wondered. “ How do they not only survive, but thrive in these parched conditions AND look amazing in the process?”

Roots pushing themselves down through scabby crust, through rock or hot-packed sand, reaching for some hidden source of life. Capturing whatever precious liquid diamonds fall from the sky, with their hands wide open. Preserving, protecting reserving them, slowly sipping them up into their bodies.

And everywhere there is the scent of sage. It escapes into the air as legs brush up against it, curling up to the nostrils in soft earthy tendrils.

Green things growing out of the dust, out of these ashes of time spun across the rock- evolving over the generations, cleverly adapting to their harsh surroundings. These beautiful bursts exploding out of desert desolation… how they inspire me!

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

He knew every rise and hollow in those fields. He knew where the soil stayed damp after a spring rain and where it dried first in July. He knew which trees the hawks favored and which hollow tree the vultures returned to every summer. He knew where the foxes denned and where the trillium emerged each spring before the canopy filled in.

He knew the land because he loved it. Or perhaps he loved it because he knew it. I’m not sure which came first. I only know that relationship changes the way we care for something.

It is difficult to abuse what has become familiar. It is difficult to poison the stream you’ve walked beside since childhood. It is difficult to strip the topsoil from land that fed your grandparents, your children, and, if you’re wise enough to care for it, your great-grandchildren.

Healthy farmers understand something Wall Street does not. That the land is not simply an asset. It is an inheritance. It is a home.

Nature has always understood this. Nothing in a healthy ecosystem exists only to take. Forests return nutrients to the soil. Rivers nourish the valleys they pass through. Fallen trees become homes for insects, fungi, birds, and new life.

Creation lives by reciprocity. The power players of our society increasingly live by extraction, plundering for a moment of pleasure with no regard for the long term consequences.

As corporations have grown larger, ownership has grown more distant. A family tending forty acres is increasingly becoming a far away investment firm managing forty thousand acres. Decisions are made in boardrooms hundreds or thousands of miles away by people who may never walk the fields, drink the groundwater, or breathe the air affected by those decisions.

When relationship disappears, everything begins to look like inventory. A forest becomes timber. A wetland becomes developable property. A mountain becomes a mineral deposit. Sacred lands become drilling opportunities.

Again and again, we have watched this story unfold on lands that Indigenous communities have called home for generations. Places held as sacred, where ancestors are buried, ceremonies are practiced, rivers are revered, and ecosystems have been carefully tended over centuries, are too often viewed through a different lens by industries seeking oil, gas, or minerals. What one community knows as a living relative, another sees as a resource to extract and exploit.

The conflict is not merely over land rights or energy policy, but a clash between two ways of seeing the world. One way is rooted in relationship and stewardship. The other way is too often driven by the economics of extraction and exploitation. When political influence can be purchased by industries with enormous financial stakes it becomes far easier for the voices of those who have loved and cared for the land the longest to be pushed aside. To be dismissed. To be silenced.

The question shifts from, How do we best care for this place? to How much can this place produce for me right now? When that happens, the land itself slowly transforms in our imagination. Forests become timber inventory. Wetlands become developable acreage. Rivers become waste disposal systems. Public lands become opportunities for extraction. The Earth is no longer a sacred inheritance to steward. It becomes an asset to quickly monetize for maximum profits.

When enormous industries that profit from extraction become major financial backers of political campaigns, those priorities inevitably find their way into public policy.

Many of the industries with the greatest environmental impact (oil and gas, chemical manufacturers, mining interests, industrial agriculture, and large utility companies, etc) spend enormous sums influencing elections and lobbying lawmakers. They aren’t donating out of civic generosity. They invest because investments are expected to produce returns.

Too often, those returns come in the form of weakened environmental regulations, delayed climate action, expanded drilling rights, reduced oversight, tax advantages, or subsidies that continue to reward pollution while the public pays the cost.

When a river is contaminated, nearby families pay with their health. When groundwater is polluted, communities pay to clean it. When forests disappear, wildlife loses habitat that can never simply be replanted overnight. When soil is repeatedly poisoned it slowly loses a richness that took centuries to build. When our climate grows increasingly unstable, farmers, homeowners, firefighters, insurance companies, and future generations inherit the bill.

The corporation records another profitable quarter. The public inherits the debt. This isn’t how healthy ecosystems work. The tragedy is not just environmental. It’s moral.

Scientists continue to document increases in the frequency or intensity of many weather-related disasters as our climate warms. Those realities are measured not only in economic losses but in lost homes, disrupted communities, damaged ecosystems, and human lives.

No single storm can be blamed on one corporation or one policy, obviously. But together they ask a hard question: What happens when a society values quarterly profits more than the long-term health of the only home we share?

I believe our environmental crisis is, at its heart, a relationship crisis. We have become strangers to the land that sustains us. And it’s is easier to exploit what we no longer know.

The same is true of people. When we are disconnected from garment workers halfway around the world, it becomes easier to ignore the conditions under which our clothes are made. When we never meet the families living near polluted waterways, it becomes easier to accept pollution as someone else’s problem.

If distance dulls compassion, relationship and proximity awakens it.

Only humans have become skilled at designing systems where one group extracts wealth while everyone else absorbs the damage. Maybe this is why Scripture begins not with ownership but with a garden.

The first humans are not handed a deed and instructed to conquer and pillage the earth. They are given a vocation. Tend it. Keep it. Know it. Name it. The Hebrew words imply serving and protecting. Not exploiting. We were appointed to live within it as grateful caretakers rather than ambitious, greedy-fisted owners of it.

If money can purchase political influence, one of the first casualties is often our ability to protect the places that cannot speak for themselves. The Earth doesn’t vote. The river doesn’t hire lobbyists. The forest doesn’t make campaign contributions.

So it falls to us. It falls to those who still know the names of the trees, who still notice where the foxes make their dens, who still believe the land is more than a commodity. It falls on us to speak on their behalf. Because what we love, we protect. That calling becomes nearly impossible when lawmakers owe more allegiance to campaign donors than to the people (or the places) they were elected to protect.

Imagine if our political system rewarded those who preserved watersheds instead of those who polluted them. Imagine if campaign contributions carried less weight than the voices of families drinking the water downstream. Imagine if the success of a nation were measured not only by its stock market, but also by the health of its soil, its rivers, its forests, and the children who will inherit them. Imagine if the powerful decision makers would bend their knee to the ground and put their hand in the soil rather dig them deeper and deeper into the pockets of powerful corporate interests.

A wise farmer never consumes the seed corn. A wise nation doesn’t either.

The question before us isn’t simply whether we care about the environment. It’s whether our democracy still has the freedom to protect it. Because when money purchases political loyalty, the Earth itself eventually becomes collateral damage.

I wonder if our environmental crisis is not first a climate crisis, but a relationship crisis. Climate change is one of the symptoms. The deeper illness is our growing estrangement from the living world. A world that has become easier to exploit precisely because we have forgotten how to belong to it.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

Unfortunately, it was headed in the wrong direction. Into our basement.

If you’ve never had raw sewage back up into your house, let me save you the experience. It’s every bit as delightful as it sounds.

We called the emergency plumber, who, for a truly inspiring emergency fee, agreed to come on that late Sunday night to assess the damage. He arrived, peered thoughtfully into pipes, ran a camera through the plumbing, and delivered the verdict.

“Your septic tank is packed full, and completely backed up.”

Perfect.

That night we threw down every towel in the house to barricade the sewage into a confined area (I would buy all new towels two days later). Then we quickly mopped, shoveled, scooped, and tried very hard not to think too deeply about what exactly we were cleaning up. By the time we finally crawled into bed, we were exhausted. Exhausted.

The septic company squeezed us into their schedule first thing in the morning to pump our tanks. Problem solved. Well, not quite. Turns out the pump in the secondary tank (the pump responsible for moving everything from tank one to tank two and then out to the drain field) had died.

Excellent. Because “replace a septic pump” was an expense our budget had been longing for.

Bryan left for Spain, feeling as if his skin still reeked of sewage. I stayed home with bleach, rubber gloves, and what little remained of my dignity.

For the next two days I scrubbed floors, disinfected shelves, threw away things that could never be trusted again, and quite possibly developed an unhealthy relationship with Pine-Sol.

Eventually I ran out of cleaner. Which meant I had to leave the house. I considered showering. (Imagine laughter imogi here) Five minutes after returning from the store I’d be right back in the basement looking like I’d wrestled a swamp monster. Under ordinary circumstances I would have of course showered first.

Reader, these were not ordinary circumstances.

I smelled like literal sewage. Not metaphorical sewage. Not “I’ve been gardening all day” sewage. Actual sewage.

My hair had abandoned whatever style I’d attempted that morning and assembled itself into something resembling an angry woodland creature off center from the top of my head. Sweat had glued my T-shirt to my body like a second skin. My face looked as though I’d been mining coal.

I had crossed into that strange territory where changing clothes felt irresponsible because I was simply going to come home and contaminate another outfit.

No. This wasn’t a shopping trip.

This was a tactical extraction. A stealth operation with two clear objectives.

Objective One: Pine-Sol.

Objective Two: Watermelon.

Avoid civilian interaction at all costs.

In.

Out.

Nobody gets hurt.

I can’t exactly explain the need for the watermelon. But it seemed critical for my survival. Perhaps my body, having inhaled enough septic fumes to qualify as a biohazard, was craving hydration. It may have been emotional support fruit. Or maybe I’d simply reached the stage of crisis where one clings to arbitrary symbols of hope.

Whatever the reason, I needed Pine-Sol and I needed a watermelon with surprising urgency.

On the drive to the store I prayed. “Oh God, please... please don’t let me run into anyone I know. That is all. That is my one small request.”

I was doing my part. Surely God could do God’s part.

I chose a store where I rarely saw familiar faces. I would keep my head down, grab my Pine-Sol, my watermelon, pay, and disappear.

Simple.

I walked through the first automatic doors. “Just keep your head down, girl. You can do this.”

Success.

I approached the second set of doors.

My aunt.

Of course.

Apparently heaven had received my prayer and stamped it: Request Denied.

I immediately started apologizing to her. “I know I look terrible. I know I smell terrible. Our septic backed up...”

She didn’t even blink. “Oh,” she said with understanding eyes. “That happened to us once.” Then she launched into her own sewage story. Who knew sewage backups were such a bonding experience?

I actually felt a little better.

We hugged goodbye (okay, so we didn’t. We didn’t hug goodbye. Because I would never do that to someone I love. I would never do that to anyone. Not in this condition).

I walked away feeling weirdly encouraged and continued through the doors toward the produce (I assumed I’d used up my quota of familiar people).

Spoiler alert: I had not.

I grabbed a watermelon that looked optimistic enough and spun around.

Ten steps later.

Church friend.

Fantastic.

Of course. I put my head down to dodge eye contact. Too late. He recognized me instantly. Again I found myself making excuses about why I looked (and no doubt smelled) the way I did.

Instead of awkwardness, he simply said how sorry he was, asked how I was doing in the wake of my mom passing, and wished me well. (Later that day his wife texted to ask if she could come help me clean. Bless her soul. But no. No one else needs to be involved in this situation. It was one of the nicest offers anyone has ever made. Also one of the offers I was most determined to decline. Some burdens are simply too... personal.)

At this point I stopped exhaling prayers not to see people. Because the Divine clearly doesn’t intervene in this way. Between produce and the cleaning aisle I ran into five more people I knew.

Reader, five.

I was becoming convinced the grocery store had quietly relocated Sunday morning coffee hour to aisle seven.

This was supposed to be a no-contact situation. I had a plan. This had been a beautifully engineered operation.

Enter.

Acquire watermelon.

Acquire disinfectant.

Leave.

I had envisioned every single step with surgical precision. I even beseeched almighty God to endorse my plan. But I was obviously on the Community Meet-and-Greet Tour that day.

Every single encounter began with me apologizing for my appearance and ended with someone offering kindness. It always went the same way.

“Oh my goodness, what happened?”

“Sewage.”

“Ohhhh...”

Then came the kindness. A hug almost happened. An offer to help. A text would come later that evening. A hilarious shit joke. A laugh. Some encouragement. More laughter. More kind words.

Nobody cared that my hair looked like I’d styled it with a leaf blower. Nobody cared that my clothes appeared to have survived a natural disaster. Nobody cared that I smelled like a cautionary tale from the Department of Public Health..

Instead, people listened. They laughed with me. They sympathized. They offered help. I felt uplifted.

I drove home with Pine-Sol, a watermelon, and the unsettling realization that my prayer had been answered almost completely backwards.

But… it turns out I needed those people more than I needed anonymity in that moment. I needed community more than invisibility. I needed connection more than escape.

I needed people to carry a corner of my burden with me and lift the overwhelm of it all. I just didn’t know it.

It was the summer we moved back to Holland, Michigan from the bustling streets of Washington D.C. My kids were constantly running across the field to the farm, to be on the heels of my parents, learning the slow rhythms of growing things. Of planting, weeding, watering and harvesting flowers, vegetables, berries, and fruit. On this particular day, I was walking the back forty when I came upon three of my kids out in the field, weeding carrots alongside my dad.

How proud they were. After helping plant the tiny seeds and patiently pulling weeds for weeks, they finally got to tug the first carrots from the earth, brush off the dirt, and sink their teeth into something they had helped bring to life.

Looking at these images, I found myself unexpectedly captivated by the simple miracle of a carrot.

Or really, of anything we pile on our plates and nourish our bodies with that began as a seed no bigger than a pin head.

We can easily become so accustomed to grocery stores and produce aisles that we forget what we’re actually holding in our hands. Sunlight woven into flesh. Rain gathered into crunchy sweetness, soil transformed into nourishment.

This is the remarkable ordinary.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

Now comes the defining climactic scene. The integrity of our elections and the resilience of democracy itself is about to be tested.

Have years of political submission so weakened the spines of their moral courage that they can no longer cut the strings and stand on their own convictions? Are there enough functioning consciences left to place the Constitution and democracy itself above party and power?

We will soon find out.

One thing seems certain: Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un (those highly admired leaders of the puppet master) are enjoying front row seats, wildly cheering on the production of their dreams- a democracy struggling to defend itself.

But every cut has a purpose.

The gardener removes what is unnecessary so the tree can flourish. Pruning is never about punishment. It is always about restoration. The wound serves future life.

Nature has little use for suffering that serves no purpose. Which makes me wonder why we’ve built an entire criminal justice system that often does exactly that.

Nearly two million people are incarcerated in the United States today. More than ninety-five percent of them will eventually return to our communities. They will become neighbors, coworkers, parents, spouses, and friends again.

If prison is merely a place to warehouse people (in inhumane conditions) until their sentence expires, then we should not be surprised when many leave carrying deeper trauma, fewer opportunities, and greater desperation than when they entered.

About two-thirds of formerly incarcerated people are rearrested within three years. Within a decade, roughly 80% will return to the criminal justice system in some way.

If the fruit tree keeps producing diseased fruit after years of pruning, we don’t blame the tree. We ask whether we’ve been caring for it wisely.

What troubles me even more is that, for the powerful private prison industries, incarceration has become a business model that is primarily seeking to maximize profits.

Private prison corporations earn money by housing incarcerated people, by keeping their beds filled. Forced prison labor can generate additional revenue. Communities become economically dependent on keeping prisons full. The powerful private prison lobbyists advocate for policies that increase incarceration, buying off politicians with hefty campaign contributions. Politicians, in turn encourage “tough on crime” policies that benefit private prisons and maximize profits while tearing holes in the fabric of society.

When people become revenue streams, the incentives shift. Success is no longer measured by how many lives are restored, but by how many beds remain occupied.

That should trouble every one of us. Because the moment human beings become commodities, we have crossed a dangerous moral line. The revolving door of our prison system is ethically bankrupt, disgustingly absurd and deeply corrupted by greed. International rights organizations routinely monitor, criticize, and rank the U.S. for having one of the world's highest incarceration rates and prison conditions so abhorrent they violate international treaties.

(Incidentally, undocumented immigrants are currently warehoused by the same private prison industries which operate and staff them in inhumane conditions, under lucrative federal contracts.)

There is another way. Other countries where people take precedence over profits do this exceedingly better than we do. They prioritize the wellbeing of society as a whole rather than serve the greedy fists of the profiteers of mass incarceration (in exchange for top dollar campaign contributions), whose goal is nothing more than to chain up as many human bodies as they can in order to maximize profits.

Norway’s prisons operate from an entirely different assumption. There, the punishment is the loss of freedom—not the loss of dignity.

Norwegian prisons emphasize education, job training, counseling, addiction treatment, mental health care, and learning how to live well in community. Correctional officers are trained not simply as guards but as mentors and relationship builders. The goal is straightforward: when people return to society, they should be better equipped to contribute than they were when they entered.

The results are difficult to ignore. Norway’s rates of reoffending are dramatically lower than ours (around 16-20%). This isn’t simply a different correctional strategy. It’s a different understanding of what it means to be human.

The private prison industry in the United States is designed with the goal of incarcerating humans and treating them in such a way that they will almost certainly commit more crimes upon release and return to fill beds again, maximizing the bottom line.

One system asks, How do we harshly punish and maximize profits? The other asks, How do we restore? As Christians, that question should sound familiar.

The story of Scripture is never one of disposable people. Again and again, God pursues restoration. The prophets speak of healing. Jesus seeks out those society has discarded. The cross itself is not vengeance but reconciliation. Even justice, in the biblical imagination, bends toward redemption.

This does not minimize the real harm crime causes or the deep pain victims endure. Accountability matters. Public safety matters. But surely we can ask whether our current system is accomplishing either.

If almost everyone in prison will one day return to society, shouldn’t we want them to return healthier? Better educated? More emotionally stable? More capable of work? More able to parent their children? More equipped to contribute to their communities?

Wouldn’t that make all of us safer?

The forest understands something we have forgotten. Decay becomes compost. Dead leaves become soil. Fire opens certain pinecones. Winter prepares the way for spring.

Again and again, nature transforms brokenness into new life.

Nothing in creation suggests that endless punishment is the highest expression of wisdom. Nothing.

We’ve confused justice with vengeance. We’ve mistaken retribution for accountability.

And perhaps the clearest sign that money has corrupted our politics is this: we have created systems that disgustingly profit when our neighbors fail- systems that intentionally aim for repeated failure.

No healthy ecosystem works that way. Not one. Neither should we.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

When the fragrance of lilacs wanders into your lungs until you are almost drunk on the longing for it...

When you lower yourself into the cool flesh of a lake on a sweltering July afternoon and the water wraps around your skin like silk...

When you lie beneath a grove of towering pines and the soft earth cradles the weight of your body...

When a newborn, slick with birth, is gathered into its mother’s trembling embrace...

When your beloved reaches for your hand, or your lips, and your body remembers that joy can be physical...

You are touching something holy.

Sometimes we look for God in all the wrong places.

We’ve searched theological systems and doctrinal statements. We’ve argued over creeds and denominations, believing that if we could only arrange the right words in the right order, we might finally capture the Divine.

But the Holy has never been so small.

The Divine is not confined to paper and ink. Not contained by sanctuaries or denominations or national borders. No religion owns it. No institution can fence it in.

The Divine is older than every religion and wider than every theology.

The Divine pulses through everything.

It rises through the veins of maple trees each spring. It glitters across the surface of the lake. It rolls smooth stones onto the shoreline. It rides the breeze that turns the silver undersides of cottonwood leaves toward the sky. It unfolds fern fronds from the forest floor and opens the white petals of a wild rose.

Spirit shines through matter everywhere.

The same pulse that expands galaxies also beats beneath your ribs.

The Divine lives within the body of the Earth. The Divine lives within your body.

The Divine lives in the wrinkled hands of the elderly, in the dandelion pushing through a crack in the sidewalk, in the body of the fox slipping through the meadow at dusk, in the child taking her first breath, and in the body that exhales its last.

When we imagine God as somewhere else (somewhere far away in heaven, accessible only through the proper doctrines or the proper gatekeepers), we begin to overlook the thousand daily encounters with holiness that surround us.

I meet many people who tell me they have felt closer to God standing on a mountain than sitting in a pew.

Many carry wounds from churches that insisted they alone possessed the truth. That God could only be encountered inside their walls, according to their rules, through their authority. Some were taught to distrust their own experience whenever it contradicted institutional certainty.

If that has been your story, I hope you hear this.

If you have discovered something sacred while watching the moon rise over Lake Michigan...

If you have wept beneath a cathedral of pines...

If you have floated quietly down a river and felt yourself held by something infinitely larger than yourself...

If you have stood beneath a sky crowded with stars until your own smallness became strangely comforting...

You need not apologize. Your cathedral may simply have a different roof.

Not every sanctuary has stained glass. Some have cedar branches. Some have desert wildflowers. Some have rivers. Some have moss. Some have waves rolling endlessly onto a quiet shore.

Gathering with a faith community is one beautiful way to encounter God. We need one another. We need stories remembered, songs sung together, shared meals, and hands that hold us through grief.

But it is not the only way.

Creation has been preaching since long before the first sanctuary was built.

The Earth has always been a great cathedral.

Matter is not what separates us from the Divine. Matter is one of the ways the Divine has always chosen to speak.

And when our own breathing finally comes to an end, these bodies will return to the same sacred earth from which they came. Dust becoming soil. Soil becoming wildflowers. Stardust returning to stardust.

Nothing is ever outside the embrace of the Divine.

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” I think he was right. We do not have to stretch our hands toward a distant heaven, begging God to descend.

The Holy is already here.

In the air entering your lungs.

In the earth beneath your feet.

In the laughter of children.

In the body of your beloved.

In the fragrance of lilacs.

In the cool waters of the lake.

In the stars scattered across the night sky.

The world has always been charged with the grandeur of God. Sometimes we just get so distracted by our own systematic theologies that we forget to notice.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.

Beneath the leaf litter and fallen branches lies an intricate web of mycelium (a vast underground network of fungi connecting the roots of trees and plants). Through this hidden network, nutrients, water, and chemical signals flow from one organism to another. An extensive communal network of sharing.

Older trees have been shown to send resources to younger saplings struggling to survive and healthier trees send resources to sickly trees. The forest does not thrive because every tree competes for itself alone. It thrives because life is shared.

Nature reminds us that survival is often a communal endeavor.

It makes me wonder why we humans (supposedly the most intelligent species) have become so convinced that healing should be a marketplace.

A thirsty sapling is not disconnected from the network because it has failed to pay its premiums. In the natural world, life is sustained through relationships of mutual dependence. Yet in our own society, access to healthcare is increasingly determined by what we can pay, what insurance will approve, or whether treating us is profitable.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking, How do we care for one another? and began asking, How will we pay for it?

That shift did not happen by accident.

Over the past several decades, pharmaceutical companies and the health insurance industry has spent billions of dollars lobbying Congress and hundreds of millions more in campaign contributions. Those contributions are not distributed randomly. They are concentrated among lawmakers serving on the very committees responsible for shaping healthcare policy. Pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, hospital associations, and other private, for-profit healthcare interests invest heavily in maintaining proximity and access to those with the greatest influence over the laws that govern our healthcare system.

This is not just a Republican problem or a Democratic problem.

Corporate money flows to members of both parties. It follows influence rather than ideology. When control of Congress changes hands, campaign contributions often shift as well. The goal isn’t partisan victory. It is access.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. It really is as simple as the old cliche’. Corporations dump ungodly amounts of money into the campaigns of candidates who will then legislate in a way that allows them to continue adding yachts and mansions to their collections.

And while campaign contributions don’t automatically buy votes, they do buy relationships, meetings, influence, and a seat at the table while legislation is being crafted, which basically translates into… votes. Votes that serve and favor the already bloated corporate profits while squeezing the literal life out of the American people. When those who profit from our dysfunctional healthcare system consistently have the greatest access to those writing our healthcare laws, it is worth asking a difficult questions.

Whose interests are most likely to shape the final outcome? And why in God’s name are we okay with this?

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans continue to make impossible choices.

Parents ration insulin because it costs too much.

Families postpone cancer screenings because of high deductibles.

People delay seeing a doctor until illnesses become emergencies because they simply cannot afford the visit.

Even those fortunate enough to have insurance often discover that coverage does not necessarily mean care. Prior authorizations delay treatment. Claims are denied. Medical debt follows families for years.

Then there was my mom.

Over the final weeks of her life, I lost count of how many times her physicians would come into her hospital room, explain what they believed was the best course of treatment, and then add almost as an afterthought, “We’ll just need to check with Medicare and the insurance company to see if they’ll approve it.”

Each time I found myself wondering, Why? How have we come to be okay with this?

The cardiologist knew my mother’s heart. He knew her medical history, her test results, her medications, and how she had responded over the previous days. Her nurses knew how weak she had become. They had watched her struggle to stand, to breathe, to recover.

Somewhere, many miles away, an insurance employee who had never met my mother and who was not a doctor or any sort of expert in the health field, would review paperwork and determine whether the treatment her own doctors recommended would be covered. Was it profitable? How much more money can we pocket if we deny her care?

The absurdity of that never stopped startling me.

One hospitalization remains etched in my memory. The insurance company suddenly decided it was time for my mom to go home. Even her nurse quietly apologized to us. “I can’t believe they’re sending her home,” she said. “She isn’t ready. I’m so sorry.”

None of us believed she could safely be at home. Not my family, not her nurses, and, from what we understood, not even her physicians. She needed rehabilitation and more time to regain her strength. But home she went. Because the insurance company said she was ready.

Ten days later, exactly as everyone feared, she was back in the hospital. Without proper care her condition had continued to deteriorate at home. This time the stay was much longer. It was followed by a stay in a rehabilitation facility (which she was also suddenly and prematurely discharged from by order of the insurance company). Ultimately she ended up on hospice care (thank God she had access to that), and was able to die peacefully at home.

I have no way of knowing whether those ten days at home when she shouldn’t have been there, changed the course of her life.

That isn’t the point.

The point is that somewhere along the way we created a healthcare system in which one of the most vulnerable moments a family can experience is shaped not only by doctors and nurses, but by callous financial calculations made far from the bedside.

When profit enters the room, compassion no longer has the final word.

That should trouble all of us. I for one, have had enough, and am finished supporting candidates who take money from and bend a knee to the health insurance industries and pharmaceutical companies.

When healing becomes a commodity, sickness becomes someone else’s revenue stream.

I understand that healthcare is complicated. Doctors deserve to be paid well. Researchers should be rewarded for developing life-saving medications. Innovation matters. Hospitals must keep their doors open.

But there is a profound difference between earning a fair return for providing care and structuring an entire system around maximizing profit for a few billionaire CEOs with very tiny hearts.

Markets are remarkably good at distributing luxury goods. They are far less capable of distributing compassion. Perhaps that is because compassion has never belonged to the marketplace. It belongs to communities. To medical care-givers. To neighbors. To families. To the quiet wisdom of forests.

The mycelium beneath our feet does not ask which tree is most productive before sending nourishment. It does not calculate whether helping a struggling sapling will increase next quarter’s earnings. It simply participates in the shared work of sustaining life.

The forest teaches us that strength is measured not only by how well we survive ourselves, but by how faithfully we help others survive alongside us. Imagine what might change if our healthcare system reflected that wisdom. Imagine if our first question was not, “How much can we make?” but, “How well can we best care for one another?”

Until we begin asking that question, we should not be surprised that corporations continue to be rewarded for protecting their own profits while people go bankrupt trying to obtain the care they need.

The health of a forest depends on every tree. The health of a nation depends on every person.

Healing was never meant to be a commodity. It was always meant to be a common good.

All images and videos @2026 Christy Berghoef. Any copying, usage or reproduction requires owner consent.