Welcome to enCultivate! I’m so glad you have found this collection of writings and hope that you will be encouraged, challenged, and motivated to delight yourself in the Lord in a more intimate and intentional way. This site has been merely a vague notion of a project for the last decade of my life. Something that I have always had an interest in, but never really the motivation to actually translate my personal journal and writings into public form. In recent years, God has brought significant challenge into my life and turned my world upside down. Everything has been tossed and turned and examined and critiqued in a variety of ways. All of which were intensely humbling.
This humbling has been a tremendous work of the Lord in my life. I have learned two valuable insights that I hope to convey through meditations and prayers for anyone who comes to read.
- My Heart is hopelessly weak and prone to wander from grace as it listens to my flesh.
- God’s grace is immense and unfathomable. I can draw upon this wellspring of love and mercy at any time and God is always faithful. Steadfast in his love for me.
I won’t go into more detail here as the point of this whole writing project is to take deeper dives into these lessons that God has been teaching me through trials and adversity.
Purpose
The main purpose and ideal behind this site is to explore Mark 12, where Jesus sums up the law by saying:
Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Mark 12:29-31 ESV
Although this will naturally lead us through many other passages and concepts that stem from this passage, the foundation of this site is to learn how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
enCultivate
I began thinking deeply about being more intentional about loving God and what it means to access the full use of my heart, soul, mind, and strength. As I meditated, prayed, and worked my way through the Bible, I was continually brought back to this idea of a garden and cultivating the soil as a picture of how I should be viewing my spiritual life and disciplines. There is something meaningful and helpful in having a picture of my life as a garden being tended to by the perfect gardener, God. This gardener loves me and cares for his garden precisely with the intent to demonstrate this love and display his glory. Cultivation is the baseline of how the Lord works in my life and deals with me as a loving Father. Cultivation is what I want to be involved in as well. Just as my Father loves me perfectly through cultivating my life, I too want to participate in this cultivation. I want to be involved in the process of seeing my heart, soul, mind, and strength changed. Changing my habits, desires, thoughts, and will to conform to the image of Jesus.
So why “en”cultivate. Well, I wanted to have something more intentional about this cultivation and the prefix en- reveals this as it indicates an intensive force (e.g., enlighten, enliven, enrage, entangle). I want to encultivate. I want to be intentionally seeking to cultivate my heart. Going out into the heat of the day and spending time in the garden caring for the tender plants of my soul. Gathering weeds. Pruning and watering as needed. I want to be about the business of caring for my life in view of how my Father cares for my life.
Join the Journey
Why not walk this path with me and “encultivate” your own heart, soul, mind, and strength. Why not take this path with me and watch the Lord change you step by step to be more like Jesus. It will definitely not be easy. Trials and struggles will surely multiply in your life. But we will be walking that same path that Jesus tread before us. And this path leads to holiness and the pure, satisfying love of our perfect Father.