The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day Seven

Planning Gardens in Winter

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” - Anne Lamott

Text: Romans 5:1-5

Several of my friends plant gardens each year, and it’s not a casual experience for them. They don’t haphazardly scatter seed and hope for the best. Oh, no. They take this seriously. It almost has a fantasy-football vibe. These green-thumb folks plan out each section of the garden, deciding what will grow best where and next to what. There is a method, an intention, and a passion behind every decision. It is truly a collaboration between them and Creation.

The reason I raise this image of a garden as we enter the deadness of winter is that it’s precisely this time of year when seed catalogues begin to arrive. Gardens aren’t planned after the weather warms. They don’t wait until spring, when the ground has thawed and become softer, ready to do its part in the process. Instead, it is now, when the ground is hard and frost-ridden, that they begin to dream of the planting season to come.

That is a beautiful picture of Advent hope: preparing for the planting season in the deadness of winter, trusting that the new life of spring will come again.

This kind of hope, Paul says in Romans 5, will not disappoint us. That’s because it’s grounded in the rhythm of Creation itself. We are embraced by God, Paul says; that is the ground in which we are planted and from which we grow. We are held inside God’s love. Hope is never naïve or futile, nor is it simply wishful thinking. Hope is trusting that in the harshest of winters, spring will indeed come again, and it’s also beginning to live from that trust.

Hope is what we do as we align ourselves with what is true about Creation, about God, and about us. It is not only an intellectual belief, but also a practice and a conviction that transforms how we show up. Hope is the waiting, the watching, the longing, and it’s also all the work we do in the process to keep things moving toward something better.

This is Advent hope.

Reflection:
Where are you finding hope in this season?
How are you participating in the cultivation of hope for yourself and others?