The joy we share as we tarry there

Learning to grow roots

Claude Monet, “Women in the Garden,” 1866.

“So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.”

-Wendell Berry ("Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front")

My girlfriend planted her first garden this Spring. I was on the phone with her an hour ago while she watered. I imagined her out there in her work clothes, yet to walk into her home, looking out at all those little saplings.

The other day she told me she harvested her first tomato, and a few weeks ago we used fresh mint from the garden for our sweet tea.

I do not have a green thumb, but seeing her excited makes me excited.

Sometimes, when I’m over as she waters, I’ll help unspool the hose and watch as she walks through Michigan summer grass to the back of the yard with it. It brings me back to being nine and standing on the acre and a half of land I grew up on in Oklahoma. One of my summer chores was to water my mom’s gardens. One beside the pool, one just outside the cedar tree, and all the beds around the house.

That was back when my grandma was alive, living forty-five minutes away from us. She’d drive to our house in her boat of a car and climb out with her green overnight bag. That bag sits in my trunk now, and if I put my nose into it, I still smell her smell—lotion and mothballs and clean linoleum. Her favorite planted thing was rhododendrons. She had two outside her front door, and she could sit on the porch swing and look at them blow in the wind.

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I’ve been on this earth for almost thirty-three years now. I’ve been an adult for fifteen of them, and in that time I’ve lived in California, Boston, Oklahoma, and now Michigan. The streets of Pasadena did not know the size of my nine-year-old feet, nor does my local movie theater remember me seeing Mulan with my best friend McClain in kindergarten.

The spirit of adventure is strong, but it tends to cut out roots.

Conversely, my girlfriend has been in Michigan for ten years, and my mom lives forty-five minutes away from the town she grew up in, the one my grandma lived in for sixty-two years—out on the plains of Oklahoma.

Their roots are deeper than mine, and I stand in their gardens and marvel at them.

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My parents removed the old above ground pool when the kids stopped using it, and in its place is a big garden of flowers. I was home in Oklahoma last weekend, and my girlfriend and mom walked through it while my dad and I talked.

Everything felt right, right there in that moment.

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My grandma lived alone for the majority of her life. My mom tells me that Jesus became her best friend as a child because she learned it from grandma. My mom says my grandma spoke in tongues, but generally only during her morning devotions.

I think God knew my grandma needed extra intimacy with him. I think he saw her faith and her love and her joy and wanted her to feel—like the New Testament talks about frequently—married to Jesus.

When she was eighty-five and no longer verbal after the onslaught of dementia, she could still sing her favorite hymn, “In the Garden.” My mom—bless her—made a recording of it. I can still hear my grandma’s soft soprano sing,

"And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known."

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My girlfriend’s friendships are robust. Tonight she is helping a friend plant her own garden; last night she dropped off sushi to a friend going through a difficult time. Yesterday she was asked to watch children for our church’s summer program.

I sometimes make the joke that she is my personal concierge. I moved to this town a year and a half ago, and she has introduced me to more than I knew existed around here.

But I know her favorite spot in town, and it’s nothing flashy. It’s on the left side of her couch, her feet under her, the blinds open, first thing in the morning with a cup of french-pressed coffee. That’s where she spends time with Jesus. Sometimes I am lucky enough to drive over first thing in the morning and do them sitting next to her.

She is a good gardener.

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You want to know what my mom plans to do with all those flowers in her garden? She wants to give them to a bride who can’t afford flowers for her wedding. She’s been growing them for three seasons now and hasn’t found anyone to take her up on the offer, but she’s not planning on quitting.

She just keeps planting.

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One of my favorite characters in the entire Bible—perhaps my absolute favorite—is the prophet Anna. She’s the woman in Luke who encounters the baby Jesus. It says she was a widow and never left the temple “but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day.” One day, Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus approach her. Here’s Luke:

“At that moment she came and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.” (2:38 NRSV)

I’ve always thought of my grandma when I think of Anna. But my mom is turning sixty in a few days and has been accumulating hours and hours and hours of time with Jesus for years now. She’s been on the lookout for baby Jesus wherever she might find him, often—I think—in her garden. And then there’s my girlfriend, sitting on her couch in the morning and watering that new garden in the evening. She’s accumulating those hours too.

They are all rooted. They are teaching me how to grow roots, too.

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Announcing Summer School, for Book Publishing!

I learned about the Christian publishing industry because I got an $800 scholarship to a $1,200 conference. I was determined to figure out how to break into the industry, but everything cost so much and felt so gate-keepy.

That’s why I’m so excited to announce a Book Publishing Summer School, hosted by myself and my dear friend Sara Billups!

We’ll have five sessions featuring a killer lineup of industry experts and authors: Alexis De Weese, Rev. Joash P. Thomas, Will Parker Anderson, Morgan Strehlow, and Chuck DeGroat.

Our goal is to open the curtain on the publishing and platform-building process and to do so affordably and accessibly! You can buy one session for $15 or all five for $60 (however, if you want to come but can’t afford it, DM me or respond to this email and I’ll cover you, no questions asked). We’d love to have you!