Dry ground can't take the water

What if you really believed you were Beloved?

Early this Spring at the farm we ordered 12+ dump truck loads of compost to be delivered to our property and spread upon the rows where our first market garden would soon be planted. We were excited for the additional nourishment the compost would add, as well as the weed suppression moving towards a low-till model promised to provide. However, something we hadn’t even considered in the realm of possibilities happened as we began our planting—we couldn’t get the compost to take water.

The best we can figure it that the compost was too dry to begin with, and we should have stirred it and saturated it thoroughly before planting. But for weeks and weeks we hand watered in addition to our twice a day sprinklers running, and still the ground an inch deep was dry. The water just kept rolling off. We were dumping water onto our freshly planted seeds and transplanted seedlings, and still they withered.

As I stood there with a hose, hand watering the rows over and over again, praying that the water would find its way to the thirsty roots of the onions we’d recently planted, I kept thinking; Our hearts are like this dry compost. And God’s love is like the water. What’s it going to take, to make it sink in?

Finally in June two things happened that turned the tide of our watering woes: my husband got a bright idea to make little furrows in the soil with a hoe so the water could get just a little bit deeper than it had before. And June brought with it some oddly monsoon like qualities with more rain than we typically get in an entire year. Like a sponge that had been too dry, but finally became soaked, our compost began holding water as it was intended.

This is not just a story about compost, water, and the mistakes of rookie farmers.

Photo by Ann-Christin T on Unsplash

Like so many of you, I’ve struggled all my life with that “head knowledge and heart knowledge” as we sometimes say in Christian circles. I know in my head that God loves me. I’ve sung the words to “Jesus loves me” since long before I knew that they meant. But in my heart, those words have always been following by a long line of asterisks.

God loves me.*******

*if I do everything right—

**and read my Bible every day—

***and always be kind to everyone I meet—

****and never doubt his goodness—

*****and pray every day—

******and never ___________.

*******and always__________.

But God’s love doesn’t come with asterisks. I know this in my head. But getting that truth to my heart? Well maybe I was the compost in need on a little furrowing and a monsoon June.

Sometimes I think God wants to pour his love out to us, but we just can’t quite take it yet. It’s too much. It won’t go in. We are so dry, and it takes persistence on his part and acceptance on our part to stop the love from rolling right off of us and into the muddy ditch. But that doesn’t mean we won’t ever get there. That’s one thing I learned while lying beneath the open country sky with a shredded faith small as a mustard seed.

Photo by Natasha Miller on Unsplash

Maybe it’s this time of year, the sunflowers blooming along our every stretch of country highway, reminding me of when we first came to this place, and the ache in my heart that made it hard to even see the beauty that was right in front of me. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been reflecting a lot since the twins’ birthday, on these past two years—the most difficult and painful two years of my life—and what has changed in me because of them.

When I came here, just a little under two years ago, I had enough faith to believe that perhaps this home, this dream of the farm, and this place would be the new season that I had been asking God for. But that was about it.

For six months I hardly prayed. I barely opened my Bible for an entire year. I was angry at God, and I felt betrayed. I was out of my mind with exhaustion most days, and the trauma of all we had suffered both in the our birth of the twins and in the recent betrayal in our church community left me feeling shattered body and soul. And here’s what I need you to understand (and maybe you already do): I just didn’t have it in me to muster up any faith.

I couldn’t “just read my Bible” to feel close to God.

I couldn’t “just give it to the Lord in prayer.”

So many of the Christian platitudes and adages that I would have passed along to someone else who was struggling the way I was became so obviously empty. I was at the end of myself. I had absolutely nothing left. And because even those two activities required an energy that I could not summon, and a trust in God that currently felt minuscule at best—I just couldn’t do them.

At first I felt ashamed. I thought often about how the “old me” would have probably judged the “current me.” But honestly, I was too tired most days to even keep caring about that. And in the middle of a season of shredded faith smaller than a mustard seed, I found God was still there.

And you know what? He wasn’t in the clouds tapping his foot wondering when I’d get my sh*t together. He wasn’t chiding me for not trusting him, or “suffering well.” He wasn’t anxious about my spiritual growth, wondering why his rising star had suddenly fallen off the chart and into the abyss of a dark night of the soul.

He was, and is, like father and mother: sitting on my front porch with me as I wept watching another sunrise after a night of very little sleep. He was with me in my weary steps to and from the nursery in the night. He held me as I raged. He was big enough for my questions, my doubts, my anger, and my despair. He wasn’t waiting for me to “get it right.” Instead, he wooed me back to him with a gentle steady-ness. Nothing I did could shake him. And in fact, he showed me in those moments of deep aching frustration, that he understood why I didn’t quite trust him. He didn’t act like it should be obvious to me in my human finite mind what good he’d been sowing in the compost of my soul this whole time. Instead he showed me gently, as the earth in my heart grew more fertile, as the water began sinking in inch by tender inch—and the seeds planted decades ago began to germinate.

Photo by Nikolett Emmert on Unsplash

I have prayed often over my decades of loving Jesus, that God would show me how he loved me—that he would help me move that head knowledge to my heart, that he would make it real to me.

Now I wonder if all those times when I begged God to show me that he loved me, if he was just pouring it out on me in hefty measure after hefty measure, but perhaps I just wasn’t quite able to take it in. Perhaps, I was like the dry compost, unable to really receive. Until I lay under the open country sky, my once stalwart faith held in shapeless tatters, the torn-up compost of my soul finally laying still long enough to take in that water drop by drop—receiving what I did not have in myself to give.

The biggest change that came through my season of wandering? Now I know God really loves me. Loves me because he loves me. Loves me like a child. Loves me without that horrifying wrath just waiting for me to screw up so he can squash me like the worm that I am. I don’t even believe I’m a worm anymore. I never was. Worm theology can bite the dust (see what I did there?).

Now, I believe in the Gospel of the Beloved.

The good news that I was loved, without asterisks, or addendums, all along. This is the perfect love that drives out fear (1 John 4:18) and it’s changing everything.

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I spoke with a woman this week at our farmers market, (we’ll call her Paige) and our conversation was so beautiful and it was every reason why I chose this farmers market. You see, this woman, like many of our customers, uses government food assistance to help feed her family. And I was able to look her in the eye this week and say to her, “you are exactly why we are here.” And I saw slight tears begin to rise behind her sunglasses as she told me how refreshing it was to hear that, when more often people like her are made to feel ashamed for needing help. Her answer both filled me with joy, and broke my heart. Because for me to be able to be refreshing, how many times has this beloved woman been treated as less than beautiful, beloved, and worthy of dignity and respect?

How many times has that treatment come from people that claim Christ but as still so soaked in a try-hard gospel of working and earning what they get, that they are unable themselves to give freely?

I hope that Paige walked away this week with her chin just a little bit higher. Her heart just a little bit lighter. Because someone saw and communicated to her what has been there all along: You are seen. You are Beloved. You are valued, and worthy of grace, dignity, and respect.

At this point in my life I am realizing just how much of life is unlearning the lies, and relearning the truth that has been right in front of you all along. Recovering my child’s imagining faith, and yours, is part of why I am here in this space.

Because what if my friend? What if you could really believe you are Beloved—just because you are? Because you exist—

What if my words can be a bit of water on the dry ground—or a spade to make a little furrow in the compost of your struggles, so that the voice of love can truly, finally, get in?

Friend, you can sit still under the country sky of whatever season this essay finds you in. If your try-hard faith is in tatters, welcome to the club. This is the heart of Sabbath. You can be still, and still be loved. You can be next to faithless, and still be carried by the faithful one. The legalists are afraid this sort of talk will lead us to a lukewarm faith, but I promise you that’s not what the monsoon of God’s love does.

One of these days, the seeds will start to grow. And they will bear fruit, and it won’t just be for you, but it will be for the folks around you like Paige, who need a reminder from another set of eyes and another pair of lips, that she is worth it just because she exists. That the overlooked, and the burnout out, and the exhausted—these are the people Jesus came for.

You are why he came. And your struggle qualifies you more than it could ever disqualify you.

When your dry ground has sat there long enough to let the rain seep in, I cannot wait to see what grows—or who those seeds will grow to feed with beauty nourishing for both the body and the soul.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash