The Sacred Ground of Barren Landscapes

 

















During the early months of sheltering in place, I daily escaped lock-down by going out on a run on country roads. The countless hills and pastures around me seemed frozen in time like sepia photographs taken centuries ago. The motionless fields were covered in the remains of last year’s unidentifiable crop, rows upon rows of dead stalks, like neglected headstones in an old cemetery. It was a bleak reminder of the statistics day after day of disease, death, and an economy on life support, as tragic and lifeless as that field. It was not anything we saw coming or expected.

What good can come of this?

Amidst the din of news reports, I listened to the quiet voices of people I trusted, ordinary prophets who said this is not going away tomorrow, this is not the end of the story, nor of our careers, nor life as we have known it, but perhaps only a change of direction, a change of plans that were not ever our own, a different path through the chaos of the world, behold something beyond our myopic vision. “Actually, it is liberating to have your plans shattered,” remarked author Andy Crouch. Something different is about to emerge.

And I heard over and over again: Take advantage of this time. Not waiting for “normal” to return on the southbound train, but instead, to seize this in-between time on a different patch of unaltered soil, a place of becoming. Not a time to bury, but to plant, to nurture, to grasp the profound significance of the ordinary, not to just make the most of the time but the most of the now we don’t yet understand, not solely focusing on what comes of it next.

Even now, months and months later, as Covid-19 rages on, that which unfolds is not a mindless flipping through a chronicle of wasted time, but that every day is an ongoing story of God's faithfulness.

I ran alongside barren fields on miles of rural asphalt that seemed forgotten and lonely. But never without hope, not running away, but running toward. Spring is coming, I reminded myself, just as it always has. It is not just meaningless fallow dirt around me or gravel crunching beneath my feet on the edges of the road, but sacred ground.

And through those endless days, I wondered, what will the children remember about this? (“Back when I was a little kid, we used to get on a bus and go to school every day.”) What will we remember? Are the “good old days” really how we lived so naively five or six months ago? And we complained about it then?

We have been so overtaken by the pandemic, that one morning, even the wild flowers began hilariously looking like the virus.

Early into the quarantine in March, sheltering alone in her apartment, my mother in law exclaimed, “They are saying this could last until July or August!”

 Well, here we are.

When our grey cheerless spring, with its cool days and forecasts of rain, slipped suddenly into summer’s suffocating blanket of heat and humidity, I changed my running routine, heading out even earlier, before the blazing heat of the day, and seeking out paths with any possible suggestion of shade.

Several weeks passed before I returned to my old rural route, where I am greeted by cows and horses and an occasional pickup. As I crossed the bridge over the slow muddy river and came around the bend, there was hope thriving in that same field, the old having been plowed under and forgiven, the new growth in a thousand shades of fresh green, that which had been planted and that which had come up on its own.

It just needed time to grow.

It still needs time to ripen.

Will we be surprised in the seasons and years and even weeks from now to see what we have nurtured, what we have pursued, choosing what to plant in those moments through the valley of deep darkness, choosing what to let go, choosing what to let grow, choosing to follow God into this?

And to see the first fruits of what hope in God looks like, not dependent on appearances or circumstances, but that on which we can stake our lives.

God is at work in a million different ways in our lives. Probably more.

God still knows what He is doing. And there, in those fields I observed what had been already growing below the surface, not anything we saw coming or expected.

“The great stories are those about redemption,” says Don Hahn, creator and master storyteller of such Disney classics as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, “the coming out of a dark place.”

And indeed, God brings the redemption. Visible accomplishments are not the point, but faithfulness to God in what is at hand. To take one step and then another into His redeeming.

To know Him more.

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet
I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
He makes my feet like the deer’s;
He makes me tread on my high places.

 Habakkuk 3. 17-19

Yet
is one of my favorite words in the Bible.
Because this is not
            the end of the story.