I’ve been in bed for the better part of the last three days. It was a culmination of things that laid me down. It was overcommitment and foolish optimism and the fierce demand of the garden in July. It was our booming and brilliant family colliding in my home at the tail end of a marathon month of traveling. It was all the abundance and bounty of my beautiful life shook up in a bag with a handful of unfortunate unfoldings, the choice to cull a loved dairy cow, the loss of a little goat, tragic news of a cousin’s life cut short.
There I was, caught in the middle of life and death and I realized I was just too tired to give a damn about much at all. So, I settled between my sheets, rising only for the unavoidable chores like milking dairy animals and feeding kids. I grabbed a mindless book and played approximately a billion levels of Candy Crush on my phone and took the wise advice I’m quick to give others: When you are so tired you want to quit, rest instead.
Donald Trump was shot this afternoon. I just got finished watching the footage with my young sons. I wished I could shield them from reality, but they are much too old for that. Instead, we must face it head on, process all the parts of it. They were terribly afraid. Moments after shots were fired, a woman’s scream can be heard ripping through the crowd. It ripped through me, and I imagined the fear that must have been felt. When my sons saw me crying, they did too.
I cry a lot at what I see. My heart breaks routinely for the damage we humans bring on each other. Sometimes, it makes me feel hopeless. Often, it makes me feel helpless. Always, it drives me to the garden to put my hands to the things I can control.
Six years ago, I turned a camera onto my life and have been juggling one big choice since then. It’s a choice that is everywhere, on family vacations and in the garden every time I step foot there and when I sit at my prayer journal or when I cook a meal. It’s a choice that comes to bed with me when I crash and it’s a choice that I feel acutely when I soar.
The question is always rising, “Do I share it? Do I say it? Is this for them? Is this what I have this platform for? Is this valuable?”
I love showing you all my garden. When you show me your trellises and your tomato harvests, I am so proud I could burst. When you tell me you made the leap from suburbia, that you put it all on the line and found some piece of earth to eek a legacy out of, I am thankful. I’ve wondered how many gardens grow because I opened the gate to my own. I’ve wondered how many people are more secure now simply because we opened the window to this life we love living. But sharing all of that is easy. My heart being laid bare is not.
I have lived my life in the awareness of danger. Call it a coping mechanism, I guess. That’s what my therapist said anyway. She said my nervousness was from a dysregulated nervous system, the fruit of childhood trauma. Whatever the case, I was afraid for a very long time. For years, I’d chew my fingernails down to the quick and stay up late imagining all manner of worst-case scenarios. I learned about the New Madrid fault line neighboring my home in Arkansas in the 4th grade and didn’t sleep well for months. The Columbine shooting happened when I was 12. I never felt at ease in school again. When the twin towers fell, I wept in my high school desk because I saw those figures jumping from the windows and I wondered if that’s what I would do too.
This last several years has been quite the test of this peace I’ve found in adulthood. The garden has served me well as a respite. Yahweh has been kind in my journey into healing. But there is an ever-raging battle that happens inside my mind. “Do I share it? Is there value?”
Baring your heart is hard, but I’ve always been a believer of doing hard things. And though I have struggled through a lifetime of anxiety and fear, I have learned something powerful. Doing it scared is sometimes the only way to make a difference. Being afraid is not the absence of bravery. In fact, sometimes the bravest thing to do is feel the weight of fear and move forward anyway.
Our nation is in crisis. In my years as a public figure, I have purposely left my opinions out of the mix. I’ve never put a ton of stock in my personal opinions, never put much pride in them. I’ve had a front row seat to all the times I’ve been wrong in my life, and its more than a few.
It’s my mind that opinions must be stated whereas convictions are lived out loud. Therefore, I keep my mouth shut and assume you all know what I believe because it’s evident in my life. But because I’ve never made any strong stance, I get to enjoy a rare look into the world of social media that is not an echo chamber. I get to see what people on both sides are saying from my place of a fly-on-the-wall.
Our nation is in crisis. I know it’s overwhelming. When Covid and all it entailed ravaged through our world in 2020, there was no rulebook. There was no firm grasp on truth. We responded with memes and humor. How the hell else do you process that kind of upheaval? I didn’t know what to do when people I loved died in locked-down wards, when my sons cried because they felt their years of youth were robbed, when division mounted to a degree I’d never known. Since then, it feels a little topsy turvy. I’ve had the unique viewpoint of a voice teaching simple gardening and forgotten skills as I’ve watched masses of people make an exodus from cities.
Humans all over are in crisis. People feel a mounting sense of urgency. They see the fragility of the system that feeds them. I know because they tell me, and I believe it because it’s no echo chamber. People in all walks, on both sides of all the arguments, are feeling that deep down sense of, “We can’t keep going like this.”
The humor has stopped numbing the sting of trauma. Tonight, I’m watching memes and jokes about shots fired at a presidential rally, but I can’t help but feel like no one is laughing anymore. After seeing three different commenters say, “I wish they hadn’t missed,” I closed social media and opened this word document because whether it’s my opinion, truth or both, I have to share my heart.
Darling, hear me. We are the solution to this crisis. I am not being a foolish optimist. I am a woman who lived in fear but now bravely lives in love.
Our humanity is our power. Our ability to love and to feel are our greatest tools.
I believe in a God that made us in His image. I believe in a God who is pure and unadulterated love. GOD IS LOVE. I know, I know, you want to shirk that off. You want to let it roll off your mind and heart like the cliché it has become. I’m begging you to sit with it.
You were made to bear the likeness of perfect, beautiful, healing, redeeming LOVE. This is dismissed as trivial, as an unpractical solution, of naivety. But darling, He uses the simple things to confound the wise. He said we would be known as His by our love for one another.
In the beginning, Yahweh created everything. He spoke it into existence. He crafted humanity from the soil and breathed His very breath into us. He planted a garden. He looked at all He had done and called it good, with only one exception.
It was not good for man to be alone. I know some of us learned this story on a felt board in a Sunday school and were told that Yahweh removed a rib from Adam to make Eve. I’ve done some diving and theorize perhaps it makes more sense that He removed a womb. Either way, in one simple action, the God of everything made a clear statement.
He demands relationship.
Everything in existence was good except for the singularity of man, so God split His image and demanded relationship for the continuation of humanity. Everything else was good. Which means it was already functioning in perfect relationship.
The garden has taught me this lesson more surely than anything in the manmade world ever could. As I sunk my hands into soil and gave myself to stewardship, I felt my fear melt away. Nature works. All over my farm, relationships thrive. It has grown me, undone me. It has challenged me to be aware of my role in relationship with absolutely everything.
The earth is in crisis. The earth itself is groaning and travailing for the manifestation of the sons of God. Wrap your head around this: it’s on tiptoe waiting for the love-bearers to burst forth, to love like He does, with a firm grasp of their value and of the value of those around them.
We weren’t made to live in a world like this. We weren’t made to carry the weight of shootings and wars, of broken people perpetuating cycles, of seemingly hopeless corruption and violence. We were made for a garden, but we are trying to survive a battlefield. We are here though, chosen for such a time as this.
You are not alive in this time by accident. You are not here just to duck your head and survive. You are the solution. Your ability to bear the image of love matters. It is one small part of the greater solution.
It may seem too simple, but if our unity were worthless, why has there been such a push for division? This system dehumanizes people at every turn. It splits us into sides via algorithm as if we were programs instead of people and pits us against each other. Morality, vaccines, political parties, social justice, religion, opinions. It’s trained us to react to the events of the world with our thumbs up or thumbs down, to think our approval or disapproval of a thing is that simply stated. It takes our opinions and groups us together accordingly. It is robbing our humanity and therefore robbing our power.
We are only as strong as the relationships we build: with Yahweh, with each other, with the earth.
We must create community. We must deny ourselves the right to be right and love our neighbor instead. We must regain the capacity to localize our needs instead of depending on systems that provide us the convenience of needing no relationship. Darling, no one is going to fix this crisis. No government, no denomination, no program.
It is God with us, Emmanuel, alive inside of us that allows us to be a force of creative love and power. Yes, pray. Yes, humble yourself and pray. But more importantly, allow those prayers to open your heart. Allow LOVE to pierce you until you wear it like your skin.
You are right to feel urgency. I feel it too. In 2020, I sat at my piano in worship and had a clear vision of a tall and leaning tower on the verge of falling down. However, before it fell, I saw lots of one-story buildings popping up as far as the eye could see. They were homes and community centers, and people were leaving the tower and running to those homes. It is mercy that has us feeling the urgency to prepare. But instead of allowing that to stir fear in you, allow it to stir hope.
Get your house in order. Get your heart in order. Every single area of your heart that has been damaged and calloused and as a result, cannot love, confront it. Allow Him to love it back to life.
Seeds want to grow. Humans want to love. Light overcomes darkness. We are not hopeless.
You may be surrounded by chaos, fully aware of the danger and maybe even afraid. But though the world is in crisis, you do not have to be.
I believe the solution to this sucking void of hopelessness is as simple as faithful stewardship of what we’ve been given and steadfast love. If you think that’s so simple, try it. It’s harder than you think, but you can do hard things.
