Planting Seeds Inevitably Changes My Feelings About Rain + Luci Shaw
For this City Notes (CN) to prep for the new year, I wanted to focus on planting something fresh even when life is so dark. The adapted excerpt below comes from Andrew Peterson's vulnerable memoir, The God of the Garden. This book was gifted to me by my friend and brother, Paul Gordon, pastor of Terra Nova ("New Earth") in North Adams, Massachusetts, and this part of the book continues to bring a smile to my face as it takes me back to one of my favorite psalms of the past couple years:
Those who sow with tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves of blessing with them.
+ Psalm 126:5-6
Instead of Lifting Us Out, Sometimes God Pushes Us Deeper into the Dark Soil
I just couldn't stop crying. It felt like:
my heart was being torn open
whoever was doing the tearing
wouldn't leave well enough alone
they kept poking at the wounds
worst of all, I had the sense that,
though the voices in my head
were from the pit of hell,
the actual wounding
was from the King of heaven
it was as if I had been begging God
to lift me out of the mud
and I saw his hand reach down
and merely push me deeper
It was one of the lowest, most desolate places I've ever been. I was in a tomb, and God wouldn't roll away the stone.
I truly believed that Jesus was God. But I was too scared to look at him, because the worst thing of all would be to see the freak in the reflection of his eyes, too ... but the gospel broke through (after counseling and revealing the false stories I had been living in full of shame and blame) because it isn't just about the fact that we're all fallen—that part's easy for me to swallow—it's about the fact that we're perfectly loved. "Jesus is God, and he loves you." I believe it completely. It's easier, though, to fling that glorious truth out to the masses than it is to let it settle deep into my own murky waters where the dragons writhe.
Looking back, it was the kindness of God that the two months set aside to make The Burning Edge of Dawn were March and April. I went into that record under the heavy, gray dreariness of Nashville's late winter.
When I looked out the window at home all I saw was rain, rain, rain.
When I looked inside at the weather of my soul all I saw was rain, rain, rain.
Not only that, the studio on Music Row was in a windowless basement, which meant that when I wasn't looking out at the rain, I was in yet another cave.
Who knows the mind of our God? Did he conspire with time and the earth's ponderous tilt into the sunlight of spring so that every day his frail, beloved child would see the bashful opening of cherry blossoms and daffodils on the way to the studio? Did he know that whatever wound was in me would heal enough that I could begin to hope that the pain would subside?
Did he know that I needed the cave to write about the light outside of it?
One afternoon at The Warren, during a short break in the near-perpetual rain, I took my guitar out to a porch swing that hangs from a drooping hackberry limb. I was bundled in a coat, a scarf, and fingerless gloves. The guitar happened to be tuned to DADGAD, and I strummed a 6/8 patter for a few minutes. The words that came were these:
I tried to be brave, but I hid in the dark
And I sat in that cave and I prayed for a spark
To light up all the pain that remained in my heart
And the rain kept falling
Down on the roof of the church where I cried
I could hear all the laughter and love and I tried
To get up and get out, but a part of me died
And the rain kept falling down
I'm scared if I open myself to be known
I'll be seen and despised and be left all alone
So I'm stuck in this tomb and you won't move the stone
And the rain keeps falling ...
I'm so tired of this game, of these songs, of the road
I'm already ashamed of the line I just wrote
But it's true and it feels like I can't sing a note
And the rain keeps falling down
That was as much of the song as I could write. My fingers were cold, it started to rain again, and I felt a little embarrassed at the thought of sharing thoughts so raw with people I didn't know.
What happened next gets a little fuzzy. I can't remember which came first. Luci Shaw's poetry or the day I went out into our muddy back garden to plant seeds for spring. Soon after I started the song and gave up on it, though, Skye (my daughter) and I went outside with a little packet of seeds and a trowel. We knelt in the mud as I explained to her what we were doing ... I hefted the trowel in my hand, then stabbed it into the earth. I did it again, then again. I tore a furrow into the ground about a foot long, then laid the trowel aside and parted the dirt with my fingers.
"What do you do now, Papa?" Skye asked. "Now," I said with a smile, "we plant the seed." I gingerly took the little thing from the packet, pressed it into the mud, and covered it over. It was like a funeral. It was like that day when I asked God for help and instead of lifting me out he pushed me deeper.
"This is how seeds grow." And the rain fell, and the rain kept falling.
Luci Shaw's perfect little poem, called "Forecast," goes like this:
Planting seeds
Inevitably
Changes my feelings
About rain
There's a lot of truth and beauty in those eight little words. Kind of like seeds. Thanks to Luci, I knew how to finish the song.
My daughter and I put the seeds in the dirt
And every day now we've been watching the earth
For a sign that this death will give way to a birth
And the rain keeps falling
Down on the soil where the sorrow is laid
And the secret of life is igniting the grave
And I'm dying to live, but I'm learning to wait
And the rain keeps falling down
+ "The Rain Keeps Falling," 2015 A.D.
Can you believe that he loves you? Could it be that when you're deep in the dark cave, it's not because he doesn't love you, but because he does? I wasn't angry at the earth when I wounded it. Nor was I killing the seed when I buried it. I was giving it a chance to be born again.
God gives me a tiny seed – a hope, a whisper, a glimpse, a sense, a promise.
He asks me to take it and steward it.
The beauty of its hidden potential overwhelms me.
The questions it raises awake my curiosity.
I want to see, to understand.
Why has he given me this seed?
So I can tell others? But I don't know enough.
So I can make it grow?
So I can celebrate when it grows?
I hold the seed but I hunger for the fruit.
The closest way to get fruit from a seed is to suck the seed – try to taste any remnant.
But seeds don't grow in mouths.
Shall I dissect the seed? But wouldn't that kill it?
Give me the patience to sow the seed – even in soil that seems rotting – what fertile soil it will become!
Mine is not to be the sun or the rain, to burst the germ or bring forth the shoot.
Mine is to tend, to watch, to wait, to be ready when it breaks through!
A Savior, a dream, and a great, wild, terrifying hope ...
The God of found things who sees me, who comes for me, again and again. He is the God of the lost coin, he is the God who would leave an entire flock of healthy and profitable sheep for that one last, broken lamb. He is the God of the lost and I will find myself once again in him.
"Jesus, come for me," I cry out. I remember small grace and grasp hold, naked and nothing, and I worship Who I cannot even feel. Isn't this faith? Not that we wouldn't fear, or doubt, or suffer. Not that the bad days wouldn't come, sometimes unrelenting, sometimes often.
Faith doesn't eliminate feeling wrecked or salvaged by good days or bad days, but the stone isn't being rolled up and crashing down like some mythical tragedy of lessons to be learned. No, the stone's been rolled away; the risen things take their place in the souls of mortals and we call them hope. Our only hope ...
God is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion.
God's kingdom lives in the ever-widening rings, the core and the hollows.
God's kingdom growth starts in the dark and hidden places, in holy ground.
In a seed busted open and yearning.
A seed of hope.
Bonus Prayer and Quote from Desmond Tutu:
Let's ask God to help us see Jesus revealed, powerful and present, meeting us in our doubts and fears today. And in receiving such hope, let's pray to be stopped in our tracks to listen and linger, shocked to be in a world where resurrection is possible, and daring to be prisoners of hope.
Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Plant a seed of hope in us today. Grow this hope with Your resurrection power and spread it around us. You are the God of hope who can fill us with all joy and peace as we trust in You. May we become who we are, human beings, wounded healers, and hope dealers, receiving resurrection power to spring forth new life, especially when feel we burdened and buried. Amen.
"I am always hopeful. A Christian is a prisoner of hope. What could have looked more hopeless than Good Friday? But then, at Easter, God says, ‘From this moment on, no situation is untransfigurable.’ There is no situation from which God cannot extract good. Evil, death, oppression, injustice—these can never again have the last word, despite all appearances to the contrary."
+ Bishop Desmond Tutu
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