This past weekend will go down in history as one of the most fun and exhilarating of my life. It was our first farmers market for our brand new farm business Further Up Farms, and for me it felt like the firsts fruits of a long drawn out labor.
It’s been an unusually cold and rainy June here in Colorado, and setting up that morning was a chilly endeavor. It felt silly to pack more than a light jacket, but numerous times I found myself wishing for some warm gloves—especially when after the market we found ourselves packing up in the middle of a torrential downpour. As the wind whipped up the rain through the the sides of our tent, a small river formed beneath our feet, but still I couldn’t stop grinning.
I loved every minute of it.
Perhaps it was the manic joy in my eyes, or the way my full and real cackle-laugh sprung from my throat, or the deep exhausted contentment that settled over me like a weighted blanket that rainy afternoon as I made a warm cup of tea for my chilly hands. But more than one family member who observed to me afterwards said, “you really loved that didn’t you?” Like they could see it written across my face.
“You’re an evangelist.” My friend Laura observed to me years and years ago, and it’s true but not only in the churchy way you might be thinking. I am an evangelist, in that I cannot help but share what I love with others. And among some of my greatest loves are food, gardening, and cooking.
I cannot help but try and convince a market member to give roasted radishes a try, even though she’d never much cared for radishes before. I cannot help but come to life when telling everyone of the wonder that is spring garlic—the way you don’t have to peel the individual cloves to have that delicious taste, or the mild garlic flavor that goes up the stem, so tender you could eat it raw. I loved to encouraging the gentleman who came looking for a tomato starts for his wife, that he had to start with a brown thumb in order to have a green one. We all have to start somewhere don’t we?
There was a joyful humility about this first day standing amongst the vegetables of our farm stand. I did not feel a compulsion to pretend to have all the answers. But I shared what I loved. I shared what I knew. I wondered in curiosity at the woman who was looking for “Black Radishes,” and I’m sure I’ll be checking the seed catalogue for those later. I laughed with the shopper who wondered if she could stick her spring garlic back in the ground and get it to keep growing. “Why not?! Give it a try!” I said.
Connection happens everywhere if we let it. Especially when you dare to show up as fully yourself.
I say this knowing full well that I could not have done this a decade ago. I would have been riddled with anxiety. I was insecure beyond belief. I would have dreaded the very possibility of a question I did not know the answer to.
“What changed?” I ask myself.
Sometimes I feel like the answer to that is, “Everything.” But mostly I think it’s that by God’s grace, a journey towards humility in my life has not meant a journey towards feeling like a piece of dirt—instead, it’s been a journey towards realizing that in the very clay of every cell of my being, I am known, and I am beloved in all my struggles and all my wild weirdness.
Besides, every farmer knows that good things grow from the dirt.
In the past, I bought into a Gospel that said the “good news” was only “good news” when you realized how truly rotten you were. There were folks in our evangelistic reach that we said things like, “they don’t realize how bad they are yet. They just can’t see how they need God yet. They think they are a good person.”
But I don’t believe any of that anymore.
I don’t think there are very many people walking around on this planet, that truly in the core of their being, believe they are actually good. Even attempts to say, “I’m good,” are followed with a mental tally: “because I do______ or don’t do _______.” No matter how you justify, we are all trying to justify ourselves in someway, religion or not. We are all trying to tell ourselves a story that says, we are okay. That’s normal. That’s human. It’s the only way we can get up in the morning.
Now, I think the Gospel is less about showing someone the “bad news” of how bad they are (so that you can swoop in with the good news about Jesus dying for them), and more about sharing with them the truly GOOD NEWS of how BELOVED they already are. I’ll never forget the line I heard in a sermon once, though I’ve long ago forgotten who was preaching. The pastor was using the metaphor of a used car and said something to the effect, “The car is worth what someone is willing to pay for it.” And by proxy, he made the connection: You are worth what Someone was willing to pay for you—and that Someone was Jesus and he gave up his Life for you.”
You are worth Jesus’ life to Jesus.
You are worth it all because you are BELOVED. And WORTHINESS is inherent in our very being because you have WORTH and VALUE to God. Humility is not believing you aren’t worthy. Humility is “freedom from pride or arrogance.” Pride is thinking too much of yourself, and I would argue, it can even manifest in a Christianized self-hatred that says, “I am bad because of xyz thing.” Even though you profess to believe that Jesus died for you, you self-flagellate every time you make a mistake, as if Jesus’ death was not enough to satisfy God’s righteous justice. As if your opinion of yourself was more important than God’s?
Years ago, I remember so clearly being in the midst of self-destructive perfectionistic tailspin. I was crying in my room yelling at God, “You shouldn’t love me!” And I so clearly heard him say to me: “Grace, you don’t get to decide if I love you or not.”
Oof. In a moment, my tears ceased and I felt the blessed relief of being wrong. Because the truth was that I thought I knew better than God what he should be doing with his time and affection. And I don’t. God knows what he’s doing. He knew what he was doing when he set his love upon me from the foundation of the world. And he knows what he’s doing still even when I’m having a bad day, getting suckered into believing that I can somehow invalidate my own belovedness with my mistakes. It struck me then, that this was pride. Humility would come through choosing to accept the Judge’s Verdict. And he proclaims me Beloved—Innocent.
It isn’t pride to believe the Truth about yourself as God declares it—in fact, I would say it’s Righteousness—Right Standing with God (which is yours in Christ) and Right Thinking about your Right Standing. (Believing that what God has said about you is TRUE.)
I’m not there yet, and I still stumble often, but I can feel it in my bones just like I can smell it in the air when it’s about to rain: loving others comes out of the overflow of knowing that I am Beloved. KNOWING IT and knowing it. In my body and in my bones and in my nervous system—that the truest thing about me is always and forever that I am LOVED. And knowing I am loved? That allows me to show up wherever I go, as myself.
So it’s safe to say, I’m about to make “The Veggie Lady” my entire personality. And I’m very okay with that. I’m leaning into the wildly weird ways that I am wired—and it feels good. Growing up, I use to worry so much about fitting in, and my mom would always try and cheer me up by saying, “You have to be a little bit weird to be normal.” But when I reflected on this past weekend (and the wild weirdness of my excitement about spring garlic) I said to her, “Oh I don’t want to be normal. I’m very okay with being weird.” And I meant it.
What a grace.
So here’s some evangelism for you—because it really is good news— are you ready?
You are Beloved, just as you are. Right now.
Wherever you are sitting.
Whatever you’ve just been thinking.
Whatever struggles you are facing, or the weirdness in your bones that makes you feel like you’ll never belong.
You are BELOVED.
And you can’t do anything to lose that, or earn it for that matter. It’s yours.
And truly joyful humility will come not from believing the worst about yourself, but from believing the Truth about yourself. The Truth as God defines it: you are worth it all to him.
And you can rest in that.
The Veggie Lady says so.
So good. And so ironic (or just perfect) that He said, “Grace, you don’t get to decide if I love you or not" because His grace is what we get. When I first read tat sentence, I read it like, “[That's] Grace, [meaning] you don’t get to decide if I love you or not” and then I remembered that's what your name is. 😁 So perfect and true. 👏🏻
Thank you Grace! I love your"voice" great job.