The other day, someone asked me what my plan was to keep from falling headlong into despair. What was I doing to maintain hope? At the time, I didn’t have a good answer.
Things are rough over here right now. The situation in China is beyond frustrating. It feels as though our lives have been put on pause, or imprisoned, or scaled down to a small and bare existence, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
To be clear, I know where hope comes from. I know the things to believe, to remember, to repeat to myself. And I know some helpful things to practice that keep my body afloat, things like exercise and sleep and eating well and sunshine and being with life-giving people.
But still. To be honest, sometimes none of those things “work.” And right now, it seems like everywhere I turn there is a great wall rising up before me, one that I cannot scale no matter how much I know or believe.
I can’t make a plan for how to get through these days.
The other morning, I walked outside with Zoë after a frustrating exchange with my three oldest children. I was near tears as I looked at the small patch of dirt around our back steps, covered in concrete shards and overgrown weeds. It has been an eyesore for two years, and I recently decided that perhaps this ought to be my “victory garden” project, which I’ve written about before. Maybe this should be my outworking of moving towards hope, I thought. I put Zoë in her walker, and started turning up the dirt with a shovel the neighbor had given me. The shovel broke.
Of course, I sat on the steps and cried, worrying that my kids would see me losing it through the window. After a few minutes, I decided to try again. I found another shovel, and started hacking at the stony ground. Soon, Zoë grew restless, and I took her for a short walk behind our building. Another neighbor, an old woman with several gaps in her teeth and a curved stoop to her back, was tending the small garden she too has hacked out of an overgrown patch of land. We watched her as she carefully lifted small seedlings from an old bucket filled with dirt and transplanted them to the ground. Her hands were shaking slightly with her age, and she smiled when she saw us watching her. “Would you like one?” she asked me. And she slowly shuffled back to the bucket and carefully picked out two seedlings, wrapping them in a large leaf and presenting them to us with her toothy smile. “It’s squash,” she said. “It will grow very big.”
I put the seedling in the ground and watered it. So far it is still alive.
I’ve continued to hack at the ground in the spare moments between meals and naps, picking out the rocks that seem endless, starting again after a maintenance man thoughtlessly spread the rock pile back over my clean patch of dirt. I’ve kept at it.
What is my plan to cultivate hope? I have no plan. Does the ground water itself, or the seed know how to grow?
I wonder if Jesus knew something of this when he told his parables of the kingdom. Here, a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies. Here, a seed grows and we know not how. Here, a kernel smaller than the eye can see becomes a tree to hold the birds.
And later, we are told that it is not the one who plants, nor the one who waters, who is anything. But it is God who makes things grow.
Is this an excuse to do nothing? To wallow, or give up? I only know that I cannot see over the walls right now. But I am still working on my patch of dirt, still watering the seedling in the ground. Is that hope? Is that a plan? Only God knows.
So, so hard. In Ghana, we faced just a tiny bit of what you all have faced in China. I remember that at one point the only recourse we could find was looking up. Cloud gazing became my one act. Praying for you as you continue hacking at the soil and hoping.