The Benefits of Starting Over
Two years ago in a gesture of generational companionship over the lost art of gardening, I bought both my mother and myself giant lilies. They were mail-order, the first thing I’d bought from a catalog since Amazon was invented. The bulbs arrived in sawdust and dirt and we ceremoniously opened them together while sitting cross-legged on the deck.
Together we measured distance and dug holes and stuck those potato-ey nuggets in the ground and prayed that these really were magic and would grow the promised six-to-eight feet. And they did. They grew taller than me, than my husband, than the fence. Bright black and orange and fierce as tigers they loomed glorious for the summer of 2017.
And so, this season, I paced in front of them, watching the progress from inches to feet. Last week they were up to my shoulder and green and grinning. Today they are nubs. It was with great sorrow that I discovered they had been weed-whacked. I will not name the culprit. But I will tell you that I actually cried a little over their fallen limbs while I stood there in my sweaty running clothes in the early morning light. They had so much promise. And now I will have to wait another year to if they rise. And if they don’t, I will start all over again with something new.
It sounds ridiculous, but this is the first time it struck me how hard it must have been for Adam and Eve to leave Eden, for Noah to leave land, for Naomi to leave her homeland. Despite all the havoc and history of all these places for all these people, it was home. It was the place where they began and it defined them. After the fall, none of it was perfect, but it was familiar. Everything after that would be rough and raw with newness.
But…
Newness brings a chance to stretch the weaker muscles. It’s like going for a hike at high altitude. You thought you were in shape from all those miles jogging down at sea level and then you learn that, no, there is a subterranean level of muscles underneath your good muscles and they are Jello. They are nothing but Jello and you will have to jiggle them up that mountain.
God loves bushwhacking through our expectations. He loves shaking us up, not because He wants to create chaos (that was our doing) but because He knows the potential in us to be the great creatures He created and He knows we won’t get there without a little jiggling.
I’m going to plant some annuals around the stumps of my lilies—bright Gerber daisies to keep them company until next year. And I’m going to start looking around my life to see where else I’ve gotten too comfortable. There will be changes here on the blog coming soon, changes in my writing life, changes is my mothering life. I’m going to start shaking things up.
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
GENESIS 3:23 (The Message)
23 So God expelled them from the Garden of Eden and sent them to work the ground, the same dirt out of which they’d been made.
GENESIS 7:6-10 (The Message)
6-10 Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters covered the Earth. Noah and his wife and sons and their wives boarded the ship to escape the flood. Clean and unclean animals, birds, and all the crawling creatures came in pairs to Noah and to the ship, male and female, just as God had commanded Noah. In seven days the floodwaters came.
RUTH 1:1-2 (The Message)
1-2 Once upon a time—it was back in the days when judges led Israel— there was a famine in the land. A man from Bethlehem in Judah left home to live in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. The man’s name was Elimelech; his wife’s name was Naomi; his sons were named Mahlon and Kilion—all Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They all went to the country of Moab and settled there.
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
