To The Untamed Heart.

Spring has been in full swing but everything is dying.

We’re standing at summer’s gate- deeper than I feel comfortable with- and my garden isn’t even growing. Somehow I never imagined half the seeds that I would place in the soil would fall dormant.

I feel sad about it. I feel like hope has been diminished a bit. Maybe more than a bit if I’m putting all of my cards on the table.

It’s busy season. June is in full swing. And the dang garden isn’t growing.

It turns out watering my garden doesn’t work if the seeds aren’t good. Water can’t fix a heart issue.

One time I read a Rob Bell book, and he talked about how sometimes this thing that’s breaking us and raising a bunch of strong feelings in our hearts is actually not the thing that’s breaking us. Sometimes in marriage, he said, fights over how to slice the tomatoes aren’t actually about how we slice the tomatoes. Sometimes this is actually about that.

My garden won’t grow.

I’ve been recalling a conversation with friends a year ago at our daughter’s birthday party in June when they were so impressed by my towering garden, all grown from seed. Within a week to the day, a year later. The only things wanting to grow are the strawberries and mint that doubled in the corner from last year. All else looks barren. Weeds barely even want to be there.

I plopped back on the couch, trying to give my best expression of contentment. Week three of family counseling for our fourteen year old, and though it has been so good and fruitful, it has been far from easy. Every session feels a bit like a surprise, not knowing what we will really trip our way through. Stumbling forward. Yes, there is progression. But it doesn’t feel graceful in the least.

So I sat in the cool of the basement office, the couch offering little comfort. Because it was a day when I just. don’t. want. to. do. it. Why can’t blended families just be easy? Why can’t everyone just take their position and just do the dang thing? How can there be so many roots to trip over on a path that feels so clear? It was one of those kind of days. I just didn’t want to be there. And while I sat trying to conceal my actual feelings, my husband sat joyfully amused with the beautiful basket of fresh flowers growing on the center of the coffee table, asking me in a tone full of wonder and excitement to look up what those little white, pin-sized flowers were growing before us. Sweet Alyssum.

A week later I was still regularly gravitating toward my barren garden, to stare at the lifeless soil to water it in denial of its emptiness. As I stood watering the weeded area that shows no sign of the two bags of wildflower seeds I scattered over the surrounding soil, my eyes caught life. There in the sea of miscellaneous green leaves were the smallest, daintiest sign of hope. Little white, pin-sized flowers.

Sweet, heavenly, sweet alyssum and my Father still enthroned All-Powerful Creator of Everything who sees children being killed in wars, kind people dying of diseases, His own truthful storytellers being killed,

who sees his thirty something year old daughter living in her quiet neighborhood with her four kids, two cats, and husband- in the epitome of comfort. And she is sad because nothing is blooming. And he meets her there with a bouquet of sweet alyssum in the morning light.

It can be hard, can’t it? Even in the good. When we feel delight welling up in our bellies. There can be sadness. There can be hard. The in-between wasn’t dubbed ‘bittersweet’ for nothing. But here is the good I am finding:

My eyes are pressed on what He is doing. I am clinging to him. We are on our hands and knees, palms beholding the earth below, and we are eye to eye with His daily bread- face to face with His glory in every-single-individual-timely-slow-patience-requiring-small-victorious bloom. We are here for it. Intently fixed on what He will do next and how he will make it happen.

Crawling with Him is a good place to be.

If that’s where He is

I think I’ll join Him.