If there’s anything these six Virginian acres have taught me, it’s that nature is not tamed overnight. The work of attempting to order the disordered so often feels like a battle I’m ever fighting and ever losing.
The growth and life that spring awakens is both exciting and exhausting. We live in a culture (myself included) that values results, production, and finished products, but rarely pauses to consider the mere act of tending and keeping and maintaining as work that is not only essential, but good and worthy.
I want a garden, flower beds, chicken coops, and patios, yet here I am still pulling endless weeds, chipping away at acres of brambles, and attempting to subdue this overgrown and unruly land into something that can support growth and use and beauty.
Staked tomatoes, arbored blooms, and manicured hedges are rightly glorified, but I’m working on seeing the glory in the slow and simple work of sometimes just holding back disorder. Continually fighting my yardful of invasive flora, stabilizing eroding hills and banks, adding things to my soil that leave it healthier than how I found it, and caring about those downstream of our creek that meanders well beyond my own land.
And here’s the thing, I need to see the value of this work even if we sold this place tomorrow. Even if it takes generations beyond my own before someone finally gets to lounge on a patio out back. Even if I never get my garden and taste the fruits of my labor.
This past season of Lent was a good reminder that pulling weeds makes room for flourishing and fruit. It’s simultaneously fighting against disorder and paving the way for order. With the knowledge that the exercise of dominion has always been meant as a vehicle of salvation, wholeness, and healing. Dominion exercised for other purposes is a travesty and a perversion of itself. It will not produce fruit that lasts or nourishes.
All things will be made new. Until then, we’re called to faithfully and tirelessly labor alongside the One who will carry it to completion, knowing that when we do, we are offered sustenance, beauty, and rest along the way
