Welcome to this week's edition of the Redeeming the Dirt Newsletter!

Redeeming the Dirt is the ministry of Noah Sanders and his family and is committed to helping encourage Christians to live for Jesus, excel in agriculture, and make disciples.

This week:

• Experiencing the Gospel this Christmas Season
• Saying YES to making homes

Experiencing the Gospel this Christmas Season

After getting back from a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with family we are now settling down to a cozy season of Sanders family Christmas traditions.

• Lots of candles
• Christmas music
• Hot apple cider on the woodstove that is now lit 24/7
• Simple evergreen decorations
• Curling up with a good book on the couch
• Talking about what Christmas tree we want to cut from the farm.
• Making apple pies and blueberry pies
• Letter writing to friends
• Reading about the first and second coming of Jesus
• Singing Christmas Carols
• Reading our advent devotional
• Playing euchre, checkers, and uno after supper.
• Early mornings with farm chores, hot tea and coffee
• Late night dreaming sessions with my wife

Of course, these are the fun part. But life is still a battle, not just a celebration.

These are foretastes of the ultimate celebration and redemption coming one day but are currently enjoyed in the context of our broken world that yearns for the second coming of Jesus.

So, we also press into our need for Jesus as we experience:

• The inevitable rounds of sickness that follow family get-togethers
• Kid's selfishness rather than gratitude
• Mother and father's temptation to laziness and tiredness
• Rooms that took an hour to clean up and just got trashed again in 5 minutes
• Trying to get everything done and talked about and not get to bed late
• Learning to enjoy simple pleasures as a family when we would rather watch a movie
• Enjoying good food without being gluttons (aren't we having dessert tonight?)
• Battling discouragement as we far fall short of our own unrealistic expectations each day
• Still getting personal devotions done during the busyness of family gatherings that throw off our normal schedule

Both of these lists are the realities of life.

The fruit of the gospel, and the need for the gospel.

Let's be grateful for both elements this season and choose to let them together point us ever more often to our relationship with Jesus.

What does He want us to do?

How does He want us to represent Him to the world?

Recently I was praying about how God wants me to represent Him to the world in my life right now and I felt like he clearly said,

"Live quietly and speak boldly."

So, I am praying about what that could look like in 2026.

Here are some thoughts I wrote a month or so ago about the importance of making homes I thought might be an encouragement to you.

Saying Yes to Making Homes

Home.
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It is a place made sacred by memories, familiarity, love, and dreams.
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It is both place and people, a space for work and rest, refuge and reception, the hidden life and hospitality.
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A real home is worn but cared for, tidy but often messy, loud at times, and still at others.
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You can manufacture a house, but a home must be grown slowly, faithfully, gratefully, through the sunny days of laughter, and the rainy days of tears.
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A happy, healthy home requires presence, both yours and the presence of Jesus. To make a home you must live at home.
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It is the place of the ordinary, the unimpressive, the unseen. The ministry of home is one of humility, testing the heart when no-one is looking, except the One who sees all.
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Let us say yes to making homes. To homemaking, homesteading, home business, homeschooling, and home churching.
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The home is the garden where the gospel is grown, and its seeds are blown by the Spirit into the dying world to bring life.

Your Fellow Steward of His Land,

Noah Sanders

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