You Start With Love
When the grass doesn't grow, grow it anyway.
Last year about this time, I watched as the maintenance workers in our apartment complex tore up the small patch of grass I had worked hard to cultivate for several months. They did it without malice, not having any idea the number of hours I had put first into digging up almost a foot of soil, then sifting out hundreds of small rocks, and finally seeding, watering and watching this small patch of green grow with the most hope I had mustered in a long time.
I called it my victory garden.
“Victory Gardens” were built by Japanese-Americans forced to live in U.S. internment camps during WWII. They were a choice to make something beautiful, something good even while living in desperate and dehumanizing circumstances. I read about them during the third long year of COVID lockdowns in China, when I was struggling to keep my head up and believe there was a purpose to our existence. I was so moved by the example of what seemed to me an echo of the Jeremiah 29 injunction to “seek the good of that place,” wherever it may be, even exile.
And so it was that I planted grass on the despised patch of dirt outside our door, my own little victory garden. A small act of putting my hands in the soil and sweating under the sun, watching seeds sprout and cheering them on daily. It was small and almost silly, but it was almost like a sacrament— an outward physical sign of a spiritual reality. I was choosing to say this place is worth my effort, and while I am here I will make it beautiful.
My victory garden took months to cultivate, and then in one fell swoop the unaware workers destroyed my little lawn (for a purpose I never did understand), and I didn’t have the heart to run out of the house and scream at them.
I’ve been thinking about that fleeting patch of grass, and those victory gardens in the internment camps, and the Word of the Lord to the exiled people of Jeremiah as I’ve surveyed my current wild west of a yard. It is patchy and overgrown, with more shrubs that are dying or dead than are alive. And it doesn’t belong to me. As in, we don’t own this home and so the question of investment into things like lawns and flowerbeds and house renovations is a sticky one. But there is something deeper than the financial angst, something that begs the question more than if I’m willing to spend my own money on a yard or house I won’t get a return investment on.
How do you come to love a place?
When I think over the places we have lived, and the work God has (as best we could determine) called us to over the years, it has always been the commitment that came first, and out of that flowed love.
But put another way, it was the choice to love a thing or a place or a person, and out of that flowed a deepening care and commitment.
So which comes first? Love or commitment? Perhaps they are one and the same, or more integral to each other than we realize.
In the biblical narrative, whenever God makes covenants he does so with the intent to carry it through regardless of what he gets out of it. His promises are not dependent on our good faith or behavior. Blessing and cursing may come as a result of unfaithfulness, but the promises of God are reliable because of his trustworthy character, not because he is waiting to see if we hold up our end of the bargain.
So what is it that moves God to initiate the covenant promises he makes to his creatures? The Bible says it is love. It is because he loves.
There is more to say here about the depths that God will go to because of his justice and righteousness, all flowing out of his goodness and love. But for me lately, it is the covenanting nature of God, and how that can and should shape the whole way we view our world and our lives that has been important.
My attitude toward each place that I live, the work that I’ve been called to, and the people I’ve been given to know and love, are to be shaped by this covenant faithfulness. We don’t live for what we get out of any of these realities. We are not here for the return investments. Which is to say that we didn’t come to this place or this work because we were guaranteed it would bring about really awesome outcomes in any area of our lives.
“Great knowers need to be great lovers,” writes Esther Meek in Loving to Know. “Rather than knowing in order to love, we love in order to know.” This is true of all of life— whether the pursuit of knowledge, relationships, faith, or anything else. Love comes first.
We’re new to this neck of the woods, it’s true. The scrawny-looking lawn and the school it sits adjacent to are like a garden we’ve yet to work with our hands. You don’t know enough, you haven’t given enough, and it hasn’t gotten under your skin just yet. Slowly though, as we spend time working the soil of this place, it is finding its way into our hearts.
Any new relationship is fraught with some insecurities, some doubts or feelings of reticence. I have felt all those things in each place we have started again. But I can also say that there is something safe in knowing that we have committed to this place and all that it holds regardless of the outcomes. The doubts won’t scare me away. The reticence won’t keep me from diving in. It is love first for me, whether I feel it yet or not. I’m here for the planting and the praying and the long days and the growth and the abundance and whatever it takes because this is the Way.
To love a place is to seek to know it, to seek its good, to plant even if it will all get pulled up in a year. To live like people who make promises and keep them, who look to the long arc of what God is doing and always hold on to hope.