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Hosted by Ruben Navarrete and author/pastor Tri Robinson, The Journey of Gratitude is a deep-dive conversation centered around Tri’s book, A Journey of Gratitude: Traversing Four Seasons of Life. Together, Ruben and Tri go beyond the pages of the book to explore the profound, sometimes messy, and always miraculous ways that God directs our paths. Part memoir and part spiritual retrospective, this podcast is a guide for anyone looking back at where they've been to better understand where God is leading them today.
Welcome to the Journey of Gratitude podcast hosted by TriTroy Robinson and Ruben Navarret.
Ruben Navarrete:Well, I guess the first question I have is, know, tell me about the wine. You know, you're sitting up here, you know, at Timber Butte. It's really the reflection of decades of your life, and I heard recently somebody say that everything that surrounds us, every thing that we have is really the echo of a prayer that we had said at one point. And it's one way of living in gratitude to remind ourselves that all the things that we have and we take for granted every day were at one point just a prayer that we had. And then, but here you are now, how old are you now?
Ruben Navarrete:77? 78.
Tri Robinson:It's part of my age issue. Can't remember my age, it's 77, yeah. Yeah, okay. I always know
Ruben Navarrete:it's about nineteen or twenty years ahead of me than 58. So tell me a little bit about the wine. How did you get to, how
Tri Robinson:did
Ruben Navarrete:the vineyard, in terms of the winemaking, Yeah, how
Tri Robinson:did that all come and that's the thing too, like you just said, like, you do things in your life that you don't expect, and then later you look back on it, you go, wow, you know, that was an important thing. Yeah. Because making wine here at Timber Butte, I mean, Nancy and I have always lived on the land and we've always had gardens and But because I was an evangelical pastor for so many years and the culture, especially twenty years ago or more, was anti any kind of thing like drinking wine. Like we were afraid to be seen in a restaurant drinking a glass of wine. Right,
Ruben Navarrete:I remember that.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, even when your parishioners came in. Yeah, and so, I mean, the big picture is there came a point in this great story of gratitude where Nancy and I were walking the Camino De Santiago Trail at our retirement from pastoring in Boise. The Lord, we really went as a pilgrimage, you know, a lot of people do it as a bucket list. Right. But we did it we really wanna hear, Lord, what do you
Ruben Navarrete:want So me Pia, what's the difference between a bucket list thing and a pilgrimage? You've used that word before many A
Tri Robinson:pilgrimage is like seeking God for direction. I
Ruben Navarrete:love that.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, and so we're seeing, because here we are, and of course, a lot of the book, Journey of Gratitude is about these seasons of life. And here we are entering kind of a last season, which we can talk about later, but we're asking, what do you want of this season of our life?
Ruben Navarrete:Right. How often do you go on that type of a pilgrimage in your life? How often have you taken time out? Because that's a, that's something you really have to take your time with. I mean, you have to travel to Spain.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, that- I mean, that's a big deal. How often do you take time in your life to reflect and then for the next chapter? How often have you really done that?
Tri Robinson:It's usually by accident. In that case, I didn't realize what was going on. Gotcha. I did know I was ending my professional phase and I was moving into another phase of life, retirement of some level, although we were ranching, you know, and so it was a lot of work, but it was different, completely, no people, you know, we're isolated here. Anyway, on this walk, Nancy felt like the Lord spoke to her through a quote from Mother Teresa.
Tri Robinson:Mother Teresa's quote was, If you want to change the world, go home and love your family. And we'd raised our kids in the mountains and in the country, and then we had moved here, but they were both in the city, and we didn't know if they wanted to ever join this project called Timber Butte Homestead. At one point they came to us and said, Dad, we think we should grow a vineyard. And I go, Why? Like, you know, what?
Tri Robinson:Right. And they go, Well, we can make wine. I go, don't make Yeah, we're evangelicals. We don't make wine. And then he goes, Jesus made wine, Jesus drank
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, was like,
Tri Robinson:it's all over the Bible. In fact, the analogy or the metaphor of the vineyard is all through the scriptures, you know.
Ruben Navarrete:Very much.
Tri Robinson:And I don't know, I said, well, then I remembered the Mother Teresa quote. And I thought, well, if they wanna do it, I'll do it, you know? And so
Ruben Navarrete:going back to that concept, investing in your family, loving them, being part of them, do you feel like there was anything in you that felt like that was making up for the years when you were more dedicated to the other type of vineyard, and that's the church planting vineyard?
Tri Robinson:Yeah, that's funny, because I always say, I felt like at one point in my life, the Lord spoke to me and said, Go plant a vineyard. And so I went up, I planted a church, right? It's called the Maybe you could have avoided that At one point he said, What are you doing with all these people? I thought I told you to go plant a vineyard. That's a joke.
Tri Robinson:I loved that phase of my life, it was a bitch. Anyway, here I am and I gotta learn about, see, they're gonna be because the I have no clue. That's a lot of education.
Ruben Navarrete:Were you nervous though that they would kind of like leave it to you and then you'd be stuck here with this vineyard or?
Tri Robinson:Well, was the deal.
Ruben Navarrete:Okay. Like
Tri Robinson:I didn't know. And first, the first thing we didn't know if Greg said grow this high, this is like vineyard now Timber Butte Ranch is, they say the highest in elevation vineyard in the state of Idaho.
Ruben Navarrete:Really?
Tri Robinson:Yeah. And so we didn't know if it worked.
Ruben Navarrete:So we
Tri Robinson:did some research and we called a nursery in Central Washington, and Nancy did. She called and she said, Hey, we're 4,500 feet, but we have a sunny slope, she described the soil and stuff. And you think we could grow grapes? And then they go, what kind of grapes do you wanna grow? We go, grapes that'll grow.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, whatever.
Ruben Navarrete:Mean, you
Tri Robinson:know that.
Ruben Navarrete:We're pretty limited.
Tri Robinson:Seriously, I was totally wine ignorant, grape ignorant. And they said, well, there's a red grape, which I was into red grapes more. Anyway, Cabernet Franc, and it grows at higher, it probably will do better there. So they said, we will sell you some vines, and why don't you just plant 25 vines and see what they do? Know, and if they live through the winter, you get more.
Tri Robinson:And it takes five years for a vine to mature enough you're doing everything right to where it'll actually produce wine, or wine grapes. And so Nancy and I drive to Central Washington, there's vineyards everywhere, you know. And this is the days before we have really good GPSs, and so we're trying to follow this GPS through all of these back country roads and all those places that were lost, and we finally find this vineyard. And we started early because we knew it was going to be hard to find. And so we're there a little bit early and we have an appointment with this guy to sell us these 25 vines.
Tri Robinson:And I didn't know, you know, like, we just have our car. I'm hoping they're gonna fit in the car, right? Because I don't know how big they're gonna be, but we're wandering around, there's a greenhouse, and so we were wandering through this greenhouse and there's this old guy in there and he's like, you know, just, he had his overalls on and he's just playing with the vines. Just looked like a laborer, And a he says, Hi folks, what are you doing here? You know, and so we said, Oh, we came to buy some, we're thinking of starting a vineyard, we're gonna buy some Cabernet from McLean's.
Tri Robinson:And he says, Really? Well, he says, You need a little education. And I knew I did, Yeah, you you knew nothing. He says, Here, jump in my truck, which was a pretty nice truck. I thought, Well, he's not really a farm worker, he's got this truck.
Tri Robinson:Turns out this guy owned this massive vineyard. Yeah. And he took interest in these two young people, not young, but village, that didn't know what the heck they were doing. Yeah. And he takes us out and he teaches me in about maybe fifteen, twenty minutes how to trellis.
Ruben Navarrete:Wow.
Tri Robinson:And how to irrigate and how to
Ruben Navarrete:prune. Just how to get started. So
Tri Robinson:that I can start forming these vines up onto this trellis work. So I drew a picture, brought it home, looked at the picture, I basically started our first vineyard.
Ruben Navarrete:Did it have the desired impact because Nancy's hope was that that would be the thing that you guys would focus on in that phase of your life? Did it bring the family together in that way?
Tri Robinson:It did. Okay. It did, everybody's into it. Yeah. And when it came time, initially, it wasn't a lot of work.
Tri Robinson:Well, it was a lot of work for me because I did, they're both working occupation.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, that's what I was thinking. If they're gonna be down there, I would be worried a little bit that this would become my project and they might lose interest in it. Yeah. That would make me nervous a little bit.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, well, so I plant 25 vines and if worse comes to worse, I'll just rip them out. Yeah. But they flourish. Okay. I put up the trellis work, I put up the irrigation, everything goes, I form the vines, they go up two stems and they go down the first quarter on the trellis, and then, you know, and they're doing really well.
Tri Robinson:After a few years, we actually have grapes.
Ruben Navarrete:How many years have you been doing this now?
Tri Robinson:I think sixteen, seventeen years.
Ruben Navarrete:And how many bottles of wine do you get out of here every year?
Tri Robinson:Well, just a small vineyard. Yeah, we're making about 500
Ruben Navarrete:That's insane.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, it gets Nancy and I through the winter.
Ruben Navarrete:Now what are the rules? Yeah. I know where to go if there's But a zombie
Tri Robinson:has been amazing. Of all the things we've ever done, this has drawn our family closer together. Really? Yeah.
Ruben Navarrete:See, that is interesting because it is in that shared effort when you have vision and you have a goal, because it's probably not a lot about the wine for you because you don't strike me as a real wine snob.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, no.
Ruben Navarrete:Never
Tri Robinson:have But, you know, I've learned a lot. You learned, yeah. And we have some really high quality wine now, people, you know, people want our wine. So we're at a point now, now this is interesting, because after that, I built the cellar for both making it and for storing it, two different And they come and they work and we have to, the harvest is a big deal. You've come and helped harvest, you know?
Ruben Navarrete:Highlight of the fall for me.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, it's good. And we get all the friends and neighbors and stuff, come and pick and we crush the grapes and they start the process. Soon as they enter the cellar, my hands are off of it.
Ruben Navarrete:Nice, that's good. Yeah. Because your son Brooke takes on the lion's share of
Tri Robinson:that, right? He and my son-in-law, Todd, and my two daughter-in-law. Okay. Well, Kate, my daughter, and Andrea, my daughter-in-law, all of them work together really well. They love doing it and drink wine while they're doing it.
Tri Robinson:So they have a good time. It's real fellowship, you know? And when we have Thanksgiving and Christmas, we drink our own wine and we share it with our friends and it's something very rich, it's added to our life.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah, and you know what, that's another thing that I wanna touch on here is it's not just about the wine, you also are raising your own livestock. I just bought a quarter of beef from you, from something that you raised here, and you have this home that you built, really not having a lot of means through your professional life. You were a school teacher, and then you were a pastor, didn't make much money. You made a lot of really good real estate decisions for sure that helped you, you know, get to where you are, but you have this beautiful picturesque place up here and you have a life. I had I told a friend recently, I said, you know what?
Ruben Navarrete:He is living every man's dream up there. It's like you've got a vineyard, you've got your horses, you can go riding, you've got that freedom, you're living off the land, you have this amazing garden that you can partake of, but this doesn't happen automatically. It doesn't happen by mistake and it doesn't happen, you don't just snap your fingers and get here. And so that, I think one of the things that has always inspired me about your life is that not only did you make really good real estate decisions, but you also made a lot of decisions along the way that were I don't think they were human decisions. I think they were where you pressed into God and He helped guide you, and you listened and you were obedient in that.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, it almost looked like an accidental out of
Ruben Navarrete:it. Right.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, as I like, that's the point of the journey of gratitude. It shows how you can kind of navigate this life and then look back and realize that this wasn't an accident. These things weren't accidents, because like, for example, one of the first things that Nancy and I do, which we'll talk about later about, one of the things that we did when we got married, we had no place to go. I couldn't get a teaching job in Idaho. And so we went back to Southern California to live on my family's old original homestead, no electricity, spring fed water, wood heat is the only form of heat, but land.
Tri Robinson:And we could raise animals, and we had a little orchard, and we had a garden. It was very small in a way, I mean-
Ruben Navarrete:And this was in the early '70s, right?
Tri Robinson:This was in the early '70s and we fell in love with the land. We fell in love with that lifestyle, you know, chopping wood for the flyer and, you know, it was really survival. I actually in those days hunted for food. Yeah. We were
Ruben Navarrete:A teacher's salary in Yeah, the
Tri Robinson:and I didn't get a job right off. I mean, we were eating what I could shoot, you know, Now for a I don't even hunt because we raise cattle and sheep and ducks and chickens. Right. You know, we produce all of our own food. This was the thing.
Tri Robinson:We realized that we could live not off the land, but we could live with the land. There's And a that is investing in the land in a way that it gives back. Interesting. And so we produce, that's why we call this a sustainable farmstead here at Timber Butte now.
Ruben Navarrete:So this goes like
Tri Robinson:This goes back to our first year of marriage.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah. Early decisions that you made and
Tri Robinson:things Actually even before that, because when we first got married, we were still up here. Was doing my master's work at the College of Idaho and we had nothing, you know, we were just living on $200 a month, And you Nancy worked in a grocery store and I drove school bus and I was going to school and, you know, I mean, we just, so we'd go glean out of the fields.
Ruben Navarrete:Yes, there was a story in your book about you and your college buddies gleaning out of the fields and really getting, not high off that, but just enjoying that.
Tri Robinson:Yeah. Yeah, no, we realized we could take advantage of the environment if it was healthy and live and we could, it would support us. Were, you know, we, in those days you didn't have freezers like we do today, you know, so we had a locker downtown where we'd have to go down and do a combination lock, go in and get our, but we would shoot, you know, legally, you know, with the seasons and stuff, we would hunt birds and I even had a trap line and raised some Christmas money that way and different I mean, we just, all of a sudden, it's just, we realized it's such an incredible, great way to live. Yeah, yeah. I
Ruben Navarrete:think about that and I think of how sad it is for today's generation that they don't really get to experience it. I mean, I'm sure there are who do have those experiences maybe in more rural places like Idaho, but for the vast majority of the population, they're really isolated from that type of lifestyle. And even kids today will feel weird about eating certain things that they know are fresh off the farm because it's not bought out of a store. And it's just a very sad commentary on our culture. And so what I think is inspiring about what you've done here and what you've done through your life is that you've started early in your life making decisions and asking yourself questions, what do we really want?
Tri Robinson:Right, and that is the question. That is the question, what is it that you really want? Not like this or that, but like in the depth of your life, what is it? What are you shooting for? You know?
Tri Robinson:And that's a question that Nancy and I have asked since we first met. In fact, our first date, well, we had the, I took her flying like the first day, have this old airplane, which we'll talk about later, but we sat and had hot chocolate in the student union at College of Gratitude said, But you want out of life? Wow, yeah.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah. But it's important to ask that question, but on a deeper level, right? And not just like, Yeah, I'd like a Mercedes, and I'd like a really nice house,
Tri Robinson:more Some of it was a little bit fantasy, you know, like my old friend Pat Armstrong, who is also a character in this book, you know, he said, oh, you finally found a girl that, you know, would go get naked, put a bowie knot between her teeth and run into the wilderness, you know, because that's what I was like looking for. Well, I don't know about the naked part, But definitely she went into the wilderness with She did, yeah. She really did. Yeah, and we had adventures. And looking back at that season of life in the '60s and early '70s, it was unbelievable.
Ruben Navarrete:Right, but I wanna go back to something that you had said very early on. We started this conversation with talking about the pilgrimage, right? Where you seek God for what you're doing in life, and then now we kind of transition to asking yourself, What do I want? And so how do you bring that together? How do you reconcile serving and seeking God at the same time having your own thing that you want to do?
Tri Robinson:Well, here's the thing. The question is, know, is it asked before the Lord? Like, you know, it's asked like, Lord, show me what I want. Show me what's really in my heart to do. What is it that I'm made for?
Tri Robinson:Why was I created? See, I believe that all my heart, you know, Romans 12, you know, that our first thing in life is to discover the one who created us, the second thing is to discover why he created us, the third thing is to go do it with the rest of your life. And then if you can do that, it's like his good, perfect, pleasing will for your life promises, And then you'll know, you know, what it is.
Ruben Navarrete:And then
Tri Robinson:you can take the talent that's already been put in you as a human being and capitalize on that for the sake of accomplishing greatness with your life, whatever that is for you.
Ruben Navarrete:You know, there's that passage that talks about seek the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart, and I've always thought that that wasn't that He's gonna give you everything that you want, but that He will put the desires in your heart that are the right ones to have.
Tri Robinson:Right.
Ruben Navarrete:And it's not about just Him giving you what you want, more you becoming in tune with what He wants and that becoming the desire of your heart, and then Him giving that to you as a fruitful life.
Tri Robinson:Yeah, and part of this story has come into that because when Nancy and I first met, we'd both kind of rejected the religious faith of our parents. She was Irish Catholic and I was Presbyterian, and we had gone off to college, and we'd just go, What we want, you know, is this adventurous life, you know, taking advantage of this world, you know, and little did we know that that would really come through an experience with God, not just on our own doing.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah. Well, I'm really excited about these conversations that we're gonna have because there is so much in them about living life, seeking God, also enjoying life and having the fruit of our labor, seeing God work in that, being productive and seeing meaning in what we're doing that goes far beyond ourselves. And so I'm really excited to go through the book, and we'll encourage people to read the book as well and get the book. But there's just so much in there about a life that is lived in that way. And so that's what I'm excited to talk about.
Ruben Navarrete:So we will have more of these conversations for sure. And so, yeah, thank you.
Tri Robinson:I'm looking forward to it.
Ruben Navarrete:Yeah. Me too. Thanks.