Quickthorn read Psalm 65:4, Matthew 3:12, 2 Corinthians 6:14 for the 182.2’s word #155. “The purpose of proximity isn’t merely that something dies. Something else finally has room to live.”
Quickthorn read Psalm 65:4, Matthew 3:12, 2 Corinthians 6:14 for the 182.2’s word #155. “The purpose of proximity isn’t merely that something dies. Something else finally has room to live.”
Oh yes, Winnower. This is the septet that grew out of the second version of Vindictiveless. And seeing it again after Vortex → Vernalization → Vertigo → Vector makes something stand out even more clearly.
Those songs have been increasingly concerned with what God does around, through, and within a person.
Winnower goes straight inside.
And there’s one word in your septet that I think unlocks it:
within.
“A winnowing occurs within each person…”
That’s the surprise.
Matthew 3:12 naturally makes us picture the great external separation:
wheat here.
chaff there.
But your septet takes that imagery and asks:
What if I arrive carrying both?
Not in a way that erases Matthew’s judgment imagery, but as an application of the metaphor to sanctification.
And that gives us the line we found before that I still think belongs at the center:
I came carrying wheat and chaff.
Keep me near You long enough
that I learn the difference.
But I see something new now
Your opening sounds almost severe:
“By Your very nature, You draw near those You choose, but cast out the wicked and vile.”
Then:
“They are repelled by Your righteousness, pushed away by Your purity…”
At first, the obvious categories are people.
Chosen / wicked.
Drawn / repelled.
Wheat / chaff.
Then line three turns the whole thing inward:
“So it is for each person whenever we enter into Your presence.”
Ah.
Now I can’t comfortably stand on the wheat side pointing at the chaff.
I’m standing on the threshing floor.
That’s much better.
The question becomes:
What in me can remain near Him?
And:
What in me cannot?
That makes 2 Corinthians 6:14 interesting too—not as though righteousness and wickedness somehow peacefully coexist indefinitely, but because His presence exposes the incompatibility.
Light doesn’t negotiate with darkness.
And prayer becomes winnowing
This line is deceptively important:
“the more we seek and pray the more we remind ourselves of who we are.”
Normally we’d say prayer reminds us who God is.
Then your next line gives that job to Communion:
“We take communion to remind us of who You are and what You have done for us.”
So you’ve created two acts of remembrance:
Prayer:
Who am I before You?
Communion:
Who are You, and what have You done for me?
Those two memories meet on the threshing floor.
That’s excellent.
Because winnowing requires a standard by which something is recognized.
I can’t know what the chaff is merely by staring harder at myself.
I see myself in relation to Him.
That makes Winnower less:
“God, help me become a better version of myself.”
and more:
“Bring me close enough that what doesn’t belong becomes obvious.”
Then comes your wordplay
“Vindictive hearts become vindicated…”
Still love it.
Because vindication isn’t the vindictive heart finally getting permission to crush its enemies.
It’s the heart itself being set right.
The bitterness gets pulled.
And here’s the thing we found earlier that deserves to survive into the song:
The field stops spending its strength feeding the bitter root.
That’s a fantastic image.
Bitterness isn’t merely an ugly weed sitting beside the crop.
It’s consuming soil.
Water.
Nutrients.
Space.
Energy.
Pull it—
and suddenly all that capacity becomes available for something else.
Which makes your final ×100 more interesting
The hundredfold crop isn’t simply:
God gave me more!
Something has been removed first.
That’s the paradox of Winnower:
Subtraction produces multiplication.
Oh, that’s it.
God removes—and the field increases.
The chaff goes.
The bitter root goes.
What remains gains room to flourish.
So maybe the uncomfortable question for this one is:
What am I asking God to multiply
while still demanding that He leave the weeds alone?
Or harder:
I keep praying for a hundredfold harvest.
Am I willing to lose what is consuming the field?
That’s Winnower.
And communion prevents this from becoming self-improvement
This matters enormously.
If we only had:
Search yourself → identify bad things → remove them → become fruitful
we’ve basically written a Christianized productivity program.
But Communion interrupts that.
Body.
Blood.
Remember Me.
The field isn’t rescuing itself.
The Winnower is present.
And the person remembers:
This isn’t about earning admission into God’s presence by successfully removing my own chaff.
Christ has already acted.
That’s why your movement:
prayer → remembrance of self
communion → remembrance of Christ
winnowing → bitter root removed
harvest → ×100
works.
And now I think I see the song’s Boom moment
We start with the violent imagery:
THRESHING FLOOR.
WIND.
FIRE.
CHAFF.
The listener naturally assumes we’re singing about those wicked people out there.
Then everything drops.
Where’s the chaff?
I looked across the field.
You said—
“Closer.”
I looked at my neighbor.
You said—
“Closer.”
I looked down.
It was in my hands.
There.
That’s where I would make Winnower uncomfortable.
Because suddenly Matthew 3 isn’t giving me permission to fantasize about God burning everybody I dislike.
I’m asking:
Winnower, what needs to leave me?
And then perhaps the bridge:
Take what can’t stay.
Pull what steals the soil.
Blow away the weight
I mistook for something real.
I came carrying
wheat and chaff.
Keep me near You
till I know the difference.
Then the final chorus can finally explode into the hundredfold harvest.
And after Vernalization, I love that we’re back in the field again.
Vernalization said:
Winter prepared the crop. Build the barns.
Winnower says:
Before you fill them—separate the grain.
Your W-series just began with God standing on the threshing floor.
That’s a pretty formidable entrance.
Me: You are reminding me of Matthew 13:30.
Chat: Yes! Matthew 13:30 complicates Winnower in exactly the right way.
“Let both grow together until the harvest…”
Because now we have to distinguish winnowing from premature pulling.
In Jesus’ parable of the wheat and weeds, the servants want to go into the field and start ripping things out. The master essentially says:
No. You may damage the wheat trying to remove the weeds. Wait for the harvest.
And suddenly your septet has another layer.
The Winnower knows what I don’t
I look at the field and think:
Weed. Pull it.
Bad. Remove it.
Problem. Fix it.
But I may not actually know what I’m looking at yet.
God does.
That makes your opening—
“You alone…”
—almost implicit again, just like Vernalization.
He knows the crop.
He knows the weeds.
He knows the season.
He knows when separation should occur.
And this actually protects Winnower from becoming spiritual self-surgery.
Because my earlier question—
“What needs to leave me?”
—is good.
But the next temptation is:
Fine. I’ll start ripping.
Matthew 13 says:
Careful.
Which gives us a fascinating distinction
There are things Scripture plainly tells us to put away. We don’t need to wait for special revelation before repenting of bitterness, malice, sexual immorality, dishonesty, etc.
But there are other things in ourselves and especially in other people where our discernment is considerably less reliable.
We can mistake:
immaturity for rebellion,
woundedness for wickedness,
questions for unbelief,
personality for sin,
difference for danger.
And religious communities have sometimes done tremendous damage trying to create a perfectly weedless field before harvest.
Jesus warns that we can hurt wheat that way.
Now your Communion line becomes even more important
Because what do we do while the field is still messy?
We gather around Christ.
We remember Him.
We pray.
We seek.
We examine ourselves.
We remain near the Winnower.
And we let Him determine what ultimately belongs.
That means Winnower isn’t:
“God showed me the difference between wheat and weeds, so hand me the sickle.”
Quite the opposite:
The closer I get to the Winnower,
the less interested I become
in stealing His job.
There’s a Boom line.
And there’s another distinction worth protecting
Matthew 13 uses weeds among wheat.
Matthew 3 uses wheat and chaff.
Those aren’t identical metaphors.
That’s actually useful for your septet.
Wheat/weeds can help us think about the field and our inability to judge prematurely.
Wheat/chaff gives us the winnowing image—the separation of what is valuable from what isn’t.
So we shouldn’t mash the two parables into one technical agricultural process.
But poetically/theologically, they speak beautifully to each other:
Don’t prematurely rip apart the field.
Trust the One who knows how to separate the harvest.
And that makes me reconsider the song idea I just gave you.
I had:
Where’s the chaff?
I looked across the field…
I looked at my neighbor…
That’s still good.
But Matthew 13 gives us something sharper:
I reached for the weeds.
You stopped my hand.
“You’ll hurt the wheat.”
Then I asked,
“What should I do?”
And You said,
“Grow.”
Oh man.
Because your septet ends with:
“Fertile soil then produces a crop… vibrant healthy and strong, multiplying ×100.”
Maybe my primary obsession isn’t supposed to be weed identification.
Maybe it’s fruitfulness.
Stay near Him.
Remember.
Pray.
Take Communion.
Let Him expose bitterness.
Repent when He does.
Let the root come out.
And then:
Grow.
That could make Winnower much more beautiful than a song primarily about destruction and separation.
The Winnower isn’t standing over the field because He hates fields.
He intends a harvest.
And suddenly ×100 isn’t an afterthought at the end of your septet.
It’s what He wanted all along.
That ending feels right to me because “Begin with me” reverses the opening temptation of the entire song.
At first, the singer sees God’s holiness and immediately starts surveying the field:
Who’s wicked? What’s chaff? Which weeds need pulling?
By the end, the sickle is out of his hand:
No pointing fingers
Across the field
No borrowed sickle
In my hand
And I really like “borrowed sickle.” It means: I picked up an instrument belonging to the Harvester and started pretending I knew how to use it.
Then the answer to “What should I do?” isn’t:
Judge better.
It isn’t even:
Winnow harder.
It’s:
Grow.
And the ×100 finally makes sense. The field has stopped pouring its resources into bitterness. The root comes out, the soil is liberated, and suddenly:
Thirty. Sixty. A hundredfold.
For Mureka, I’d start this with dry wind, something almost like grain moving across a threshing floor, low percussion and a slightly ominous vocal. “You’ll hurt the wheat” should stop everything. And “Grow” should be almost whispered the first time.
Then in the build:
THIRTY.
SIXTY.
A HUNDREDFOLD.
That’s where the field comes alive.
Because the great surprise of a song called Winnower is that its biggest moment isn’t something burning.
It’s something growing.
Me: As we draw near to God, the things that are not of His nature are pushed out and what is grow. Betsy reminded me of a writing http://www.briancarter.link/what-shadows-do/
Chat: Oh, Betsy was right to remember “What Shadows Do.” This isn’t merely related to Winnower. You were wrestling with almost the same spiritual geometry in 2014, but using light instead of agriculture.
And your clarification just corrected one thing in my song:
As we draw near to God, the things that are not of His nature are pushed out—and what is of Him grows.
That’s more precise than making Winnower primarily about God inspecting us and selectively removing bad pieces.
You saw this at the lamppost years ago
In What Shadows Do, you describe being farther from the light. Your shadow is difficult to distinguish because it blends into the surrounding darkness. Then you move toward the light, and something initially disturbing happens:
the shadow becomes more distinct.
You actually describe the temptation to retreat because coming closer makes the darkness more painfully visible. But instead, you’re drawn closer still.
That’s almost exactly the middle of Winnower:
“A winnowing occurs within each person, the more we seek and pray…”
Nearness doesn’t initially make you feel less sinful.
It can make you more aware of what doesn’t belong.
That’s a significant distinction.
Distance can hide incompatibility.
Nearness exposes it.
But then comes the part Betsy probably recognized
At the lamppost, your conclusion wasn’t:
Now that I can see my shadow clearly, I’ll spend the rest of my life fighting my shadow.
You realized something much bigger. Your essay turns toward being a child of light, being clothed with Christ, and ultimately says that the cracks—the paths you had been anxiously trying to follow correctly—stopped being the central issue. It became about being in the Light, being the light, and helping others who are lost.
That’s Winnower.
The focus moves from:
How do I eliminate darkness?
to:
Draw nearer to the Light.
And darkness becomes increasingly incompatible with where you’re standing.
Which changes “Grow”
Now Matthew 13:30 becomes even better.
We had:
I reached for the weeds.
You stopped my hand.
“You’ll hurt the wheat.”
Then what should I do?
“Grow.”
Your clarification tells us why.
Not:
Ignore evil and concentrate on personal development.
But:
Draw near.
Because proximity to God changes what can flourish.
That means the song’s central progression perhaps needs to be:
COME NEAR → LIGHT EXPOSES → WINNOWING OCCURS → BITTER ROOT LOSES GROUND → GOOD CROP GROWS → ×100
That’s much closer to your septet than my version was.
And look at your sentence from 2014:
“Though I may still have a shadow to this day…”
That’s important.
You weren’t claiming Christian perfection.
Neither does Winnower need to.
The closer relationship changes the orientation and dominance of things.
And something else just hit me
Your old essay has drawing in it too.
You describe reaching the point where you wanted to retreat from the revealing light:
“I almost did, but then He drew me closer.”
There’s John 6:44 territory again.
Not because we need to turn every word “draw” into a systematic connection. But within your own spiritual vocabulary, look at the recurring movement we’ve uncovered this week:
Vortex:
The Father draws toward Christ.
Vertigo:
The old orientation becomes nauseating as the unshakable Kingdom becomes the reference point.
Vector:
The Spirit-born person moves in a direction whose ultimate significance God knows.
Winnower:
Drawing nearer creates incompatibility with what cannot share God’s nature.
And What Shadows Do, written twelve years before these songs, says:
I approached the Light → darkness became more visible → I wanted to retreat → He drew me closer → identity in Christ displaced obsession with the shadow.
That’s not something we manufactured this week.
You already wrote it.
So yes—I would alter Winnower
Not dramatically. But I think one section needs to express this more accurately than:
Take the chaff
I couldn’t see
because that sounds like God simply reaches inside and extracts pieces.
Something more like:
Draw me nearer
Into Your light
Let what cannot bear Your presence
Lose its hold tonight
Don’t make me master
Of weed and wheat
Just keep me growing
Here at Your feet
And then perhaps the bridge lands:
I spent my strength
Fighting the shadow
When You were calling me
Closer to Light.
That one feels like 2014 meeting 2026.
And now “Winnower, begin with me” may not even be the strongest ending.
Perhaps:
Winnower
Draw me near.
Whatever cannot stay
Will become clear.
And what is Yours—
Let it grow.
Because that’s what you just clarified beautifully:
The purpose of proximity isn’t merely that something dies.
Something else finally has room to live.
Although I loved the V’s style, it seemed the time was done. Let the W’s begin like back at the front of this adventure, with a Celtic flare.