Today I welcome author and artist Betty Slade as she shares about both her book and her art.

October Apples

Every season has its harvest. There is a beginning, middle, and end to each season. We plant, water, cultivate, and gather in the harvest. Four seasons in a year. We are in harvest season according to the yearly calendar.

The harvest for this season is Taming Wild Hearts. It is the first book in my Disappointment Valley Series. I wrote about a sweet country family living on the Crawford River Ranch in the heart of Archuleta County. Tucked away from the noise of the world, fighting for a way of life for their family, faith, and community, this family lives in their unpretentious ways. They are hard-working folk who have raised good kids, claimed their pew on Sunday morning, and helped their neighbors. They could be any of us.

When I look back on my life, I can see clearly how so many seasons have come and gone. I’ve lived in metaphors of Disappointment Valleys and mountaintop experiences. These beautiful Rocky Mountains have taught me much.

Our lives also move in seasons. We have trusted the waiting process. We’ve experienced birth and new life in the spring of our lives, growing in grace in the summer, harvesting our labor in the fall, and digging deep in the dormant deadly winters. To my generation. It’s time to gather the harvest of what we’ve planted. We have planted seeds in friends, family, and business. We have watched these relationships mature over the years.

Each apple carries three or four seeds. Depending on the size of the tree, we can expect to harvest 200 to 300 apples per tree. In older apple trees, the apples could yield up to 700 to 800 apples. Can you imagine what older people have stored in them—knowledge, wisdom, and faith. They stand where they are planted. They are still yielding fruit.

When we first came to the Lord, we were like hard, sour, green marbles rolling around and telling the world what Jesus did for us. Our faith was small, but our hearts were bursting in a love relationship. We were experiencing the honeymoon of heaven. That love has never diminished but has grown like the love in a marriage relationship. Even in the changing, we grow together and love more.

My generation is welcoming a new season. It’s time to gather the harvest. Our branches are ladened with ripe, red apples. If we don’t share the fruit, the birds will peck at the apples, and they will fall to the ground and rot.

God uses gold to describe our faith. Our faith has been tried and found to be true. We carry the fruits of the Spirit: Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against which there is no law. Today, our faith is full of juicy apples. The seeds have been planted into other lives across the country. We have no idea who we’ve fed and where the wind has blown the seeds.

Find me online at www.bettyjslade.com