We Sow In Hope

The little stream sings
in the crease of the hill.
It is the water of life.
It knows nothing of death, nothing.
And this is the morning
of Christ’s resurrection.
The tomb is empty. There is
no death.[1]

We had a garden in the back yard of the house where we became a family. My husband built it for me at my request, despite the fact that my thumbs are notoriously black. He built it out of love, not out of expectation or obligation. I remember that, whenever I flip through the photos of him in the yard with my boys—so small in that season, before either of their sisters were born. It took wheelbarrows of soil to fill the ten-by-twelve raised bed. But no one complained. We simply filled, dumped and raked until it was ready. Fresh earth. Fertile ground. This was more than a metaphor, then. It was a season of planting, both for us, and for God.

O you who hear our prayer, to you shall all flesh come (Psalm 65:2 Esv).

The sober season of Lent always finds me saggy with expectation. I try to let myself experience the weight of it, even as I sometimes feel caged and pressed by its darkness. Forty days in the wilderness is a long time, and I am too hungry for the post-fast celebration. I consider skipping straight to Easter Sunday in my heart—wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be something special? I nod to myself, answering my own questions. I know the value of Lent, I know I won’t skip it. And perhaps it’s this knot situated in the middle of my chest that makes the everlasting hope of Easter that much more beautiful, that much more worth the wait.

The planting of the backyard garden was tedious, but easy. The watering, too. It was the waiting that tested us. It’s always the waiting. I helped myself to discarded gardening books on the donation shelf at the library, but used them primarily as a visual stimulant, rather than sources of proper study. In the afternoon while my children romped wild in the backyard, I sat on the patio beneath the pergola festooned with the sturdy limbs of an old trumpet vine, with the books in my lap. I poured over lush images of other people’s gardens, and imagined my own garden achieving such a state of glory…