I’ve promised myself that I’m going to go out into the garden with my camera and record everything — all the bare spots, the overgrown spots, the weeds gone absolutely wild — everything.
I’m going to record it all, make copious notes and study them over the winter. I promise myself this every year, but this year I’m going to actually do it. I’m going to do it so that I can research the heck out of it and make it better next year.
I recognize that this is what I do in every other aspect of my life. I take inventory constantly — where are the failures, how do I mess up, what could I have done, how can I fix this?
This approach has value in the garden; there is nothing inherently wrong with it. I note that the tulips did fabulously well this year, and I order more bulbs to add to those that remain. After consulting with other nearby gardeners, I am certain I planted my dahlias too late and that they suffered because it was a wet summer. The first point I can rectify; the second isn’t mine. Gardens teach us by trial and error, and good gardeners pay attention. But a life is not a garden bed to be endlessly amended.
There are places where careful examination is fruitful. The benefit of making mistakes is learning from them. Certainly, we hope to cultivate the art of the apology well. We endeavor to notice patterns that don’t serve our families and make changes. This is life rendering wisdom. But at some point, examination becomes excavation. We keep digging, certain that if we analyze deeply enough, we will discover the precise moment when everything went wrong. Then, presumably, we can ensure that nothing ever goes wrong again.
If only …
I wonder if all our constant self-improvement is a subtle way of refusing grace. Grace begins with a gift, with receiving what we did not earn and cannot manufacture. It acknowledges that God is at work in places we cannot see and in people we cannot control.
It’s tricky business to nurture a family with the keen eye of a gardener and also to surrender to the gift. We want to cultivate marriages. Our sincerest hope is to raise flourishing children who love God and love one another. Home, in the perfection of our imaginations, is a place of rest and peace. When something goes awry, when the vision fails to bloom, our instinct is often to turn immediately toward ourselves: What did I do wrong? What should I have done differently? How can I fix it?
But the people we love are not projects. Husbands do not need to be managed into becoming who we think they should be. Our children’s lives are not final exams in which their happiness, holiness or success will reveal whether we were good mothers. Even my own life is not a problem God has assigned me to solve.
Grace means that God is acting in my family in ways that do not depend upon my getting everything right. That does not absolve me of responsibility. Sometimes I need to apologize, change a habit or have a difficult conversation. But often, my job is just to make dinner. It’s to listen to the same story all the way to the end without touching my phone. As difficult as it might be, sometimes I am called to simply sit with someone who is hurting without producing a plan. In a world where I am proud of my ability to provide and to manage, I am learning that very often the holiest thing I can do for my family is stop evaluating us long enough to actually be with them.
Maybe that is what I need to remember when I walk through the garden with my camera. I can notice the bare places without believing they indict the gardener. I can pull some weeds without imagining that every weed is evidence of failure. I can move the hydrangea. I can take careful notes. And then I can put down the notebook. Because September light will also fall through the trees. One last rose will bloom where I forgot to look. Bees will be buried deep in the dahlias, and apples will ripen faster than we can eat them.
None of those things happened because I managed them perfectly. I didn’t plant the apple tree, and I don’t know what variety of apples grow there. I’ve lived here six years; that tree bears fruit every other year without me doing a thing, and I’ve just learned it yields the best apple pie I’ve ever eaten. Some things are cultivated. Some things are improved. But often the best things are simply received. Wisdom lies in knowing the difference.
The garden can be a project. My family cannot.
They are not evidence of how well I have lived my life. They are the people God has given me to love. And perhaps he is asking me to stop taking inventory long enough to look at them, listen to them, delight in them, and receive them. God wants my presence, not my perfection. I suspect my family does, too.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
