Your Harvest is Already Germinating

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Karen Marie

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

“Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Galatians 6:9 (NRSV)

Devotion

This verse lands like a hand on the shoulder and a whisper in the soul. A reminder that the calendar keeps turning, but the call remains steady: keep planting good in the world, even when the ground feels stubborn. Keep showing up, even when your spirit feels like it’s running on low battery.

Let’s be real: weariness is not a moral failure. It’s proof that you’ve been investing your heart somewhere meaningful. Doing good isn’t always glamorous. Sometimes it feels like you’re pouring from a cup that hasn’t been refilled since last Tuesday.

Sometimes it feels like you’re loving people who don’t yet have the capacity to love themselves. Sometimes it feels like justice moves too slow, community takes too long, and healing requires more patience than you signed up for.

But this verse holds a promise wrapped inside a challenge: don’t quit before the breakthrough. Don’t abandon your post in the field just because the sprouts are shy. Most of the miracle happens underground anyway.

The proper time is not your time. It’s not the clock on the wall or the deadline you circled in your planner. It’s the moment when what you’ve sown, watered, prayed over, and cried through finally meets the season it was designed for. And when it comes, it won’t be small. The harvest will meet you in abundance, in joy, in clarity, in restoration, in connections you thought were lost, in growth you didn’t know you were making.

This is an invitation to trust the slow work of goodness. To remember that faithfulness is a rhythm. To know that your consistent yes, your imperfect, tired, hopeful yes, is shaping something beautiful.

So as this new week approaches, exhale. You are not behind. You are not empty. You are not forgotten. You are not broken. You are already whole and holy. You are cultivating a future you can’t yet see, but God absolutely can.

Hold fast. Keep tending your field. Your harvest is already germinating.

Reflection

1.    In what area of your life have you been tempted to give up, and what would it look like to take just one more faithful step forward?

2.    What signs of “underground growth” can you name (subtle shifts, small wins, moments of grace)?

3.    Who or what helps restore your energy when weariness creeps in?

Action

Choose one practice of replenishment to commit to this week, something small but consistent. A walk, a prayer, five minutes of silence or sitting in stillness, a stretch break, a journal entry, a cup of tea in actual peace. Mark it on your calendar and keep the appointment with your own restoration. Your harvest needs a nourished you.

Lived in Love

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Bishop Tim Wolfe

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quotes

“Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us, and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

~Ephesians 5:1-2 (CEB)

“The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.”

~St. Gregory the Great

Devotion

Those quotes are a sermon all by themselves. Love is much more than an emotion. It is the thing that prods us to extend ourselves to others, to make thoughtful sacrifices without a second thought. It cannot be passive, nor can it be held in reserve.

Wherever love goes, love flows.

As Paul suggests to the Ephesians, love is the key to becoming more like our Maker. Thus, love becomes the litmus test for holiness in our lives. If the things we cherish lead to loving attitudes and behaviors, they are godly. If our thoughts and opinions move us to put love into action, then they are just. If what we cling to plants seeds of bitterness, resentment, and disgust—even when such emotions have logical roots—our lives become choked with weeds of hatred. It’s nowhere to live, because love has no room to grow.

St. Paul and St. Gregory set high standards for love. Paul defines it by its epitome: the love of Christ, which reached its height in Jesus’s final breath. Gregory says love “works great things.” This is not the sort of love that settles for roses and chocolates. It’s more than kindness and generosity. This is gutsy love—sweaty love, the sort of love that cares more about what it can accomplish than what it demands.

The fragrance Paul describes isn’t the Valentine’s Day smell of flowers and potpourri. It’s the pungent scent that rises from a sacrificial altar, a sweetness comingled with the stench of charred flesh and death. It is an odor that is pleasing to God, but rarely pleasant to us. So real love’s purpose isn’t focused on making us happy. Its spurs self-sacrifice that creates change. It is the love of God displayed in human ways on a human scale that nonetheless reflects God’s epic patience, compassion, and forgiveness. It is decisive and courageous; all-inclusive and farsighted; willing to endure pain and turmoil in its tenacious pursuit of something greater than what presently exists.

While true love doesn’t seek happiness, it miraculously makes those who truly love truly happy. They don’t need rose-colored glasses to see God’s love at work, because they live in love. Lived-in love activates a life of rich experience. It turns every thought and deed into an act of worship that pleases God.

St. Gregory understood this. He devoted his life to reforms that stressed the nature of God’s love and was hailed as “the Father of Christian Worship.” He lent his name to the matchless Gregorian chant that captures the soul of sacredness. That’s why musicians and singers look to him as their patron saint.

To live in love is serious work. But despite its toil, it inevitably fills us with song. So, chant, sing, dance—but most of all, live in love.

Reflection

1.    Where has love become a test of your holiness or dedication?

2.    How can you live in love? What would it mean for your love to be lived-in?

Action

Take a moment this week to love just for the sake of loving. Tell someone you love them. Do a small act of kindness.

Chosen Family

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Kevin Marsh

LGBTQIA+ Person of Faith

Quote

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Acts 2:42-47 (NRSVUE)

Devotion

Community is a tricky thing when you grow up Queer in an un-affirming environment. Speaking for myself, for most of my life, I have lived my life as a perpetual wanderer. A nomadic friend to all, known by a few type As a Leo, I like to think it’s because I am charismatic yet mysterious; but in actuality, I know that it’s a distorted coping mechanism forced upon me by my need to survive. As a gay man who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, I learned early that secrets are currency. What you know about others is traded and passed around, used as cannon fodder for who was and wasn’t a “real part” of our community. To be known, to be out, to live in authenticity for a kid like me, would have meant isolation. A physical casting out of the community that I had known, and so I stayed silent. I shrank myself small. I contorted myself to hide in a glass closet to try to maintain proximity to what I was so sure was what community was. I was surrounded by people yet so guarded and secretive in order to not out myself, I utterly alone.

But there’s something kismet about finding the right community. The kind of community where you feel at peace. One where you in all the fullness of who you are, fits like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Where your walls and guards that you hold up during the day can fall away like a raincoat when you reach the entry way of your home. That kind of community comes with a certain freedom that overwhelms the soul and brings a sacred feeling of exhale. A chosen family. It’s one of the double-edged swords of the Queer experience. RuPaul once said it best that “as gay people we get to choose our families.” And it was a feeling that for the longest time, I thought I wouldn’t find and frankly, didn’t know existed.

Oddly enough, it was when I was alone that I found my first instance of true community. In the summer of 2020, I had moved out of the Midwest for the first time, started my education at Yale Divinity School, and was away from everything that I had ever known. I was also finally reckoning with my own lived experience as a gay man and a Christian for the first time. It was there that I was scooped up by the beauties of community. I found myself in a small quarantine pod with a handful of my fellow Queer divinity school students. Those individuals would soon become much more than cohorts; they would become chosen family. The people who I shared everything with, for the very first time. The people I still go to when I need to remember why I fell in love with being a youth minister, when I need someone to hold me accountable in love, or when I just need to debrief a crazy first date. And its these people that I think of when I read about the community of the early church described in the book of Acts. The early church casts a vision of chosen family where all is shared in common, where members are seen and known and cared for, and where mutual aid and fidelity are the building blocks of a faith community. But what strikes me the most here is the salvific nature of this kind of community.

It's a crazy feeling when you let people into your world and heart and allow yourself to build a chosen family. I feel like I’m not alone in saying that our western individualistic culture primes us to isolate ourselves and to hide away. When things look bleak, our defenses are to retreat internally, to put up defenses and be skeptical of everything and everyone. But when we start to experience the goodness of community as its meant to be, you realize that the world, however scary it looks, isn’t devoid of all goodness. In a political and socioeconomic climate that often seeks to demonize LGBTQIA+ people, we need to find ways to infuse our souls with hope, and what I have found is that building up our communities, our networks of trusted people, our chosen families, might be the most effective tool we have for hope and resistance. The early church, as a small religious movement within second temple Judaism, this sort of community is what infused them with hope as well. Hope to face the regime of empire, hope to face the dawning of each day. And with the work that many of us are doing and will continue to do in the face of empire, fascism, and bigotry, I would argue that this ancient practice of fellowship could be the thing that fuels us with the strength to carry on.

Reflection

1.    Take a moment to reflect on the people in your life whose presence feels sacred. What relationships in your life make you feel a sense of holy community?

2.    One of the beautiful things about the early church was its willingness to constantly draw their circle wider, to open their chosen family to those who needed it. Are there any people in your life who you feel drawn to build that sacred friendship with?

Action

The chosen family of the early church, all people held up one another through the bonds of mutual aid and love. Consider finding a way to support those in your chosen family through mutual aid this week. If you have someone in your community in need, is there a way you can rally around them? If your inner circle has enough to spare, find ways that you can come together to support those most vulnerable in your midst.