“There are moments when you will stand before your field of dreams, with calloused hands shoved into pockets, while not a single shoot bursts forth with life. Despite your best efforts . . . earnest prayers. Despite the exasperating impression that every other field around yours is in bloom, alive. . . . The most beautiful things in the grand old world began as seeds that waited in the dark.”- Jennifer Dukes Lee
“To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.”- Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NKJV)
Jennifer Dukes Lee concludes her Introduction to Growing Slow as she exhorts you to embrace a different story about everything you’re growing. To exercise your faith to believe what your eyes cannot see. Therefore, Jennifer beckons, lets:
- consider the things we’re growing and ponder the depths of their roots
- ease our way back to an un-hurried life, embrace seasons as sacred and holy
- call out the value in the small, good things we’re growing
- talk about how we distort God’s love, creating an ersatz version that’s all about earning, consuming, and growing a bunch of stuff
Above all, Jennifer underscores, the land teaches us how to un-hurry our hurry-sick hearts. Furthermore, the Hebrew word for land, eretz, stands as the fifth most frequently used noun in the Hebrew Bible. Hence, the land serves as more than a backdrop for stories in the Bible. Rather, the land is a leading character in the biblical narrative, beginning in the Garden of Eden.
In conclusion, Jennifer offers these thoughts about life and the land:
“That’s the simple, complicated truth about life and the land — marked alternately by healing and death, and joy and pain and sorrow and celebration. . . . We want the joy and the dancing. We are desperate for comfort, growth, and progress.
However, there are times for all things, even the devastating things and the slow, boring things. Let’s take our time and explore the complexity of each season, wrestling if we must. For it’s here in the dirt of these fields that God teaches us about ourselves and most importantly, about himself.”
Today’s question: What do you see when you stand before your field of dreams? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Permission to be un-spectacular”
