What if God's invitations rarely arrive as explanations?

What if they come as images, stirrings, symbols, recurring questions, and living metaphors that quietly ask us to pay attention?

In this episode of The Heartlifter Way, Janell Rardon explores why discernment begins not with certainty, but with noticing.

Drawing from the unexpected wisdom of a moonflower vine growing in her backyard garden, Janell reflects on the difference between explanation and metaphor—and why the soul often learns through symbols long before it understands through words.

Together we'll explore:

• Why discernment starts with noticing
• The difference between explanation and metaphor
• How God often speaks through recurring images, invitations, and patterns

The Four Birth Season Questions for spiritual discernment:

• What keeps returning?
• What gentle nudges am I experiencing?
• What sensations and feelings am I noticing in my body?
• What is becoming clearer?

If you've sensed something stirring beneath the surface of your life but can't quite explain it yet, this conversation is for you.

Because sometimes the sacred arrives as a metaphor before it becomes a direction.

And sometimes God's clearest invitations begin as a quiet stirring that becomes impossible to ignore.

Take a deep breath. Slow down. Notice what is taking shape.

The moonflower may have more to teach us than we realize.

🌿 Connect with Janell Rardon & Heartlift Wellness on Substack

• Website: ⁠janellrardon.com⁠
• Instagram: ⁠@janellrardon⁠
• Substack: ⁠@heartliftwellness⁠
• YouTube: Heartlift Wellness
• Download the "Principles of Discernment" PDF: Trust What is Taking Shape
• Download the "Discernment Prayer" to use during our Birth Season: Prayer PDF

A Birth Season is not about a dramatic transformation.

That is so countercultural.

Everything online tells us:

• Reinvent yourself
• Scale faster
• Launch bigger
• Hustle harder
• Push through the pain

But there is a gentler way to live:

Notice.

Listen.

Journal.

Pray.

Walk.

Tend.

That's The Heartlifter Way in six words.

🌿 Connect with Janell Rardon & Heartlift Wellness

• Website: janellrardon.com
• Instagram: @janellrardon
• Substack: @heartliftwellness
• YouTube: Heartlift Wellness

What if the wilderness is not a sign of God's absence—but an invitation to encounter Him in a deeper way?

In this thoughtful and soul-stirring conversation, Janell sits down with Old Testament scholar, spiritual director, and author Noel Forlini Burt to explore the sacred role of the desert throughout Scripture and our own lives. Drawing from her book, God in the Desert: A Spiritual Theology of Wilderness in the Old Testament, Noel invites us to reconsider seasons of uncertainty, silence, waiting, and spiritual disorientation.

Together, they discuss the difference between wilderness and punishment, how God meets us in places of vulnerability, and why the desert may be a place of transformation rather than something to escape. They also explore a powerful question many of us are asking:

How do we discern the difference between being in a season of wilderness formation and simply being chronically exhausted or living in survival mode?

If you've ever felt like God has gone quiet, wondered whether your difficult season has a purpose, or longed to find meaning without rushing the process, this conversation offers a gentle invitation to slow down, listen deeply, and discover the gifts hidden within the wilderness.

• Why wilderness is often a place of formation, not punishment
• How to recognize God's presence in seasons of uncertainty
• The spiritual gifts of silence, solitude, and waiting
• Hagar's wilderness story and what it reveals about the heart of God
• Wilderness formation versus survival mode
• Why we don't need to rush healing or force meaning from our pain
• How the desert invites us into deeper trust, presence, and becoming

Whether you're walking through a season of grief, transition, unanswered questions, or spiritual dryness, this conversation reminds us that God is often doing His deepest work in places we least

In this episode, we explore: Why wilderness is often a place of formation, not punishment
• How to recognize God's presence in seasons of uncertainty
• The spiritual gifts of silence, solitude, and waiting
• Hagar's wilderness story and what it reveals about the heart of God
• Wilderness formation versus survival mode
• Why we don't need to rush healing or force meaning from our pain
• How the desert invites us into deeper trust, presence, and becoming

Whether you're walking through a season of grief, transition, unanswered questions, or spiritual dryness, this conversation reminds us that God is often doing His deepest work in places we least expect.

Because sometimes the wilderness is not where we lose our way.

Sometimes it's where we find God.

🌿 Connect with Noel Forlini Burt

• Website: Noel Forlini Burt Website
• Substack: Noel Forlini Burt on Substack
• Book: God in the Desert: A Spiritual Theology of Wilderness in the Old Testament (IVP Academic)
• Author Page: God in the Desert (IVP Academic)

🌿 Connect with Janell Rardon & Heartlift Wellness

• Website: janellrardon.com
• Instagram: @janellrardon
• Substack: Heartlift Wellness
• YouTube: Heartlift Wellness