Hopeless Faith
By: Tawnya Gibson
Tags: Faith and Life, Memoir, Creative Non Fiction, Faith, Creative Writing

(photography credit: Tawnya Gibson photography)

It was near freezing and there was a touch of snow on our garden box in the midst of late spring. It brought instant panic, my voice shrill and the anger quick. Except it wasn’t actual anger, but anxiety and defeat masked.

Our garden box is directly in front of our garage and under our miniature apple tree. Our tree had tiny budding apples heavy laden on each branch. A welcome sight after losing all of our blossoms to a late freeze last year. I’m not a gardener by any stretch, but it’s something that has always been in my life. My parents had a garden and with it, I learned how to till the dry dirt of New Mexico every year. I didn’t love the Saturday morning weed pulling, but I did enjoy that first day when peas would emerge and, tasked with harvest, eating until I was sick. I saw the benefit, always, of growing your own food and eliminating some food insecurity, as much as circumstance would allow, but I was never one to be with the land. In our twenty year marriage, growing a garden has flitted in and out. A small patch in our rented yard in Oregon for grad school. A break from it all while we lived in cramped quarters in California. A renewed respect when we forever settled back in the Intermountain West. My occasional garden, however, is never precise and probably haphazard and would most definitely make the masters groan and weep with my inefficiency. I would probably have given up completely years ago, relying solely on my farmer’s market to provide my bursting freezer each winter, but my son always wants to grow something and in a sense of duty and care to pass along my limited knowledge for his sustainable future, we try again.

This year, amid a world of uncertainty, the thought of homegrown tomatoes and spinach sounded smart. And soothing. And tangible. We planted peas and lettuce and spinach and started tomatoes and peppers inside, a new experience for our household. The weekend of mother’s day, the unofficial start of all things planting and green where I live, we transferred the fledgling plants, hoping the starts were actual plants and not cast off weeds from the outside soil we had used in planting. We quickly read and transplanted the starts, including a cantaloupe my son had babied, and crossed our fingers for the best. And then, a few days in, we woke to that snow and my voice raised and my hopes sunk. Quick and sudden and swift.

I sat with my anger and wondered about my reaction. A garden has never been do or die, make it or break it in my life. It was always on the periphery. If it grew, it grew. If we only harvested a handful of veggies, that was ok. It wasn’t as much a hope as it was a means to make sure I could, if needed and to make sure my son had a firm foot, should he need it. So the anger was surprising until it wasn’t. But sitting there, I had to acknowledge that this garden in this year was an act of faith and hope in this hopeless year. I recalled praying with each seed. We were in the middle of such uncertainty, both in the world and closer to home and each seed seemed seeped in a promise. A bargain with God, almost. “I’m doing my part. I’m planting a garden and doing my best to make sure we’ll be ok. I’m planting my shaky faith, please let it grow and flourish as a sign that we’ll make it through.”

My faith has always seemed small. I’m not sure if that’s actually true or just the story I’ve told myself so often and for so long that it seems true. When sitting in your home, wrapping a sweater around your shoulders to ward off the cold, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s true or just a story because it feels true and important and the biggest thing in your life. When despondency takes hold, you find so many instances to support the thinking and you cycle through, again. That’s where my hamster wheel of faith was before the garden was planted this year. I had gone around and around and was on my way back down to catch the upswing, again, and then? Spring. Spring seemed to hasten the descent.

The funny thing with bargaining with God is that it rarely works. You can state what you want to happen all you want. You can innumerate and outline and be very specific, but God works within rules and science and logic and that often doesn’t alter late May cold snaps and snow that seems to concentrate only in the well surrounding tender plants in your garden facing the garage and nestled under the apple tree. The anger seemed more logical through this light, of course. But it didn’t diminish even with the realization. Especially as your voice tells you that only if my faith was stronger or more sure footed, clearly God would have heard my pleas and understood how much importance had been placed on these tiny seeds and protected them from the elements. But he didn’t and they weren’t and that must mean that our current situation is hopeless and here is the proof.

Once the storms passed, my son resumed watering, daily. We saw new growth on the lettuce and spinach and peas. Through some miracle, onions broke through the soil, like soldiers in a row. The peppers looked shell shocked but the tomatoes showed promise. The cantaloupe seemed stalled, but I’m not sure I can blame the cold. I feared we may have transplanted incorrectly and harmed it. As I peeked in daily, my anger cooled. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more riding on the outcome of these plants than I wanted there to be. And I certainly didn’t understand if my garden survived what that meant for every thing I thought I understood about my faith and my hope and my prayers.

This year’s garden was an act of faith, for sure, but it was an act of hopeless faith. I’m not quite sure of the difference, yet, or whether the difference will be evident as life’s storms pass. But I do know that there is much in our life that is unsettled or uncontrolled, right now. Watering a seed and watching it grow to something useful gave me a little control, back. Something tangible to do while the world madly spins around me. And when I saw that white clinging to green, I felt a total sense of despair. In the days and weeks since, the despair hasn’t fully gone away. The hopelessness and worry greeted me at every daily watering and didn’t go away as we harvested the biggest apples we’ve ever harvested and the tomatoes that wouldn’t quit and that one perfect melon that was the crowning joy of my son’s broken summer. I wonder what that means about my faith. Is it really faith if I need physical proof my prayers were heard? Or is it just a different kind of faith? One born from pain and heartache and hopelessness.

Hopeless faith. It seems important right now. Almost like I’m on the verge of understanding something I’ve not understood before. I’m just waiting to figure it out for sure. What this garden that really was something beyond just a garden in this year when things seems to be just a little bit more actually meant now that snow once again blankets where the miracle plants were.