I don’t have a whole lot of experience with gardens and I know next to nothing about plants. But I am married to someone who knows about these things, so we are on year number 3 of having a garden.
And maybe it’s silly, but the process never ceases to amaze me. It starts out nothing but dirt and tiny seeds, and then one day there are armfuls of tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, and squash.
Well, maybe to say “then one day” is a little misleading. Because for weeks and months there is no harvest. I am still buying tomatoes, despite the many tomato plants in our garden and in pots on our deck. I can see growth, but until last week, the garden yielded nothing edible. And even still, we’ve only had one measly squash.
In the last few weeks I have found myself staring at the garden wondering if this will be the year we get nothing. I feel stupidly skeptical. How can piles of dirt produce food? It’s taking a long time, and in fact, it feels like it is taking too long.
Sometimes growth and change just feel like they are taking too long.
In the last week alone, I have heard seven people say some variation of “I sound like a broken record,” and I have found myself feeling like that’s true of me as well.
Sometimes it feels like we are staring at our lives, wondering if this will be the season that never ends, if this will be the struggle that never yields fruit, if our lives will forever look like dirt and weeds.
Sometimes, when we feel like a broken record, we really need to change what we are playing.
But most of the time, what we mean when we say that we feel like a broken record is that this season is lasting longer than we thought. That growth and change are taking too long. That pain and sadness and anxiety are lingering long past their welcome.
In an era of streaming television, Spotify and Pandora, fast food, and instant everything, we expect change to happen fast. We expect growth to happen immediately when we realize we need to grow. We expect unpleasantness or discomfort to last only as long as it takes to say, “play next episode.”
I tend to hold onto these expectations with all my heart. Unfortunately, they are nonsense.
It’s just not how it works. I used to feel like if I stared hard enough at my babies, I could actually watch them grow, I could catch them getting bigger right before my eyes.
But just like it takes children time to grow physically, it takes adults time to grow and change mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally. Seasons change, but some seasons last a long time.
And rather than fighting the pace or the length of a struggle, we can choose to be gracious with ourselves and with the process. We can adjust our expectations and expect change (both in us and our environments) to take some time. We can breathe deep and choose to be patient, remembering that growth and change are always a process that unfold over weeks, months, and even years.
I love living in climates where there are seasons. Just when I think it’s going to be hot forever, I wake up one morning to the chill of early fall. Just when winter seems never ending, I spy a little bit of green hope poking up through the ground. Just when my garden seems like it’s never going to be ready, dozens of red tomatoes peek out from their green cover.
Have faith and be patient. Give yourself time like a gift, wrapped with grace and gentleness. This season will not last forever; the seeds that you have planted will bear fruit.