When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.
Edward Mote
What happens if you spend every day for years praying for your husband and he comes home one night saying he met someone else?
What if you spend a year fasting and praying for healing and the doctors keep saying there is nothing wrong?
What if your daughter is never waking up even though the whole community prayed talitha koum daily for her?
What if your pastor is also your abuser and he retains the pulpit after you name his abuses?
What if you do all the treatments and take all the supplements and you never get pregnant?
What do we do in the seasons of our life when God stays silent? Or, when God slams the doors closed that we prayed on our blistered knees would open? What do we do then?
In Genesis, God gives us humans dominion over the land. We know intimately how often we have planted our seeds, tiny dreams and prayers we hope God will water into fruition. We dream by ourselves and in community what the feast may taste like on the distant day of the harvest. Like all farmers, though, our dreams are at the mercy of the soil and the rain.
I love a good harvest. I love the juiciness of fresh produce. And yet, in my long short life I have also learned that the planting is still worth the process even when the soil cracks in thirst. Placing all our hope in God perched atop the watchtower desperately waiting for morning is worth the endless nights. I still believe, in spite of all my eyes have seen, that the sun will rise. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m a hopeless hopeful. I can’t help though but to imagine how it would feel for the sun to finally crest the horizon and warm my face long after everyone else has given up. To participate in the unlikely or impossible joy of the first fruits.
But, again, what do we do if it doesn’t, as I think so often for many of us it never does?
I believe there is a kind of gentle love you can only experience in the desolation of the watchtower, hungry for a never coming day. There is a kind of tender touch from the Savior when you take your last breath in the darkness of the still-looming horizon. There is a refined faith that can only be experienced when you fully and truly know this barren world is not all there is, that even if the dawn doesn’t arrive on this horizon, I know I will still see the purest dawn in heaven.
I don’t know how the Gardener decides which plants to sprout and which to wither. I don’t think I ever will.
Maybe our seeds decompose and their nutrients feed the dreams of those who have planted in community around us. Maybe our prayers for our own growth are prayers God uses to grow someone else.
Maybe our planted seeds take a long, long time to grow, and will one day finally sprout for the generations to come, to feed someone else in their time who did not have the strength to dream for themselves.
Maybe our long days in the soil aren’t about the harvest at all. Maybe God just needed to get our fingers in the dirt. Maybe we just needed to exercise our hope muscles, shoving our fingertips in God’s good earth to connect in a way we hadn’t thought to before.
Maybe our dead dream, still if it is planted with a Halleluiah, can be used to nourish more widely than our single harvest. We worship, after all, a God who gardens life from death.
And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46 NRSVue
God slams the door on Jesus’ life and that one dead dream saves the entire world. A God like this can use your dead dream, friend. This God can be trusted with your offering, even if all you have to offer up is tears.
When God doesn’t – I still believe.
When God doesn’t – God is still good.
When God doesn’t – I will cling to hope.
We will mourn our dead and decayed dreams. And then we will get up, and we will climb into our watchtower, and we will wait with tear-streaked, grief-riddled anticipation to see what God does with our tears. And one day, maybe in a couple days or maybe not for a couple generations, God will wipe away the memory of our dead dream and replace it with a good and holy light.
Let it be so in my life, good and complicated Gardener. Let it be so.
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Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He sells poetry art here, published a collection of poems titled Weak Eyes, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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