I remember what January felt like two years ago. The windowpanes were cold against my palm. The sky was a dull shade of grey. We were home, all seven of us, and news of a virus that was fast gaining traction was taking over our lives.
At that time, we decided to hunker down and stay put for the long haul. Many foreigners decided to leave the country and it was difficult to watch them go, but also forged a solidarity among those that remained. I remember feeling like this was our small version of what previous generations had experienced when some sort of calamity hit the Far East— and this was our opportunity to stick it out.
I can’t believe it’s January again a full two years later, and in some sort of deja-vu-like anniversary we are back in a very similar place. The temperatures have dipped below freezing for many days now. The sky hangs low and metallic. And we are all home again, now the eight of us, with the virus again taking over our lives.
But this time I haven’t felt so keen about sticking it out. This time, I’ve questioned more than ever what it is we are doing here, and if we can keep doing this for the long haul. I see so very many people talking about this in online spaces: the exhaustion, the being done with it all, the apathy about quarantine self-improvement projects.
In the first few days of January, I was slipping into that angry, giving-up-on-it-all place. And then, in a weird moment of grace, my son read to me from an AP research paper.
I’ve read about Japanese-Americans forced to live in internment camps during World War II before. But I’ve never heard about their gardens. My son read to me from interviews of internees who were forced to leave their homes and live in desolate landscapes that were often windy and barren, unbearably hot in summer and cold in winter. In their incarceration, they had turned to garden making as a way to resist. They made rock gardens and ornamental gardens, vegetable gardens and gravel gardens. They refused to give in to the desolation. They preserved their culture and humanity. They resisted the harshness of their condition, and they did it with beauty.
Psalm 23 has long been a favorite of mine. It is so well known and overused that in some ways it can lose its power, the words running through your fingers like water you have too much of to appreciate. But I love to mediate on it, and find that again and again, it reshapes my view of the world. After hearing about the gardens and the way the Japanese-Americans so beautifully resisted against their circumstances, Psalm 23 had something to say to me again.
Tucked into the middle of the song, is a line I have always read as some sort of victory God promises to his children. A victory that may not always happen in this life—
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
Here is David, laying out what it looks like to walk through life with God as our great Shepherd. A God who leads us, sometimes through verdant fields and still waters, and sometimes through valleys of shadow and death. It’s a life on this earth, not some future place without struggle. It is here that the Shepherd prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
But sometimes it seems like my enemies have the upper hand! What then?
It occurred to me, that perhaps this is the God’s way of saying he too is into acts of Beautiful Resistance. In this world, you will have trouble. You will! But take heart, I have overcome the world. Make a rock garden in the desert. Grow a vegetable in the gravel. Eat at my table even in the presence of your enemies.
Somehow, more than anything else in this bleak month of the new year, this has helped me. I don’t have to give up. Nor do I have to expect that God will take away the circumstance (and be disappointed if he doesn’t). I don’t have to leave, or quit, or even find the silver lining. But I do have to find ways to beautifully resist. Ways to put my foot down on the cold, hard concrete of a grey world and say, I will make or do something of beauty. Something that says God is with me and does not fail me. Something that says, the world matters. My home matters. Bodies matter. People matter. Goodness and love matter.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies
My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love with follow me all the days of my life.
May it be so.
Once again your writing brings me to tears as the Lord uses your gift with words to quietly and gently speak to my soul in the midst of the hard places in life. May we find beauty in today.
May it be so for you dear Christine, may we learn from our sons and daughters! Miss you and pray you find beauty and grace and a way to resist.