What a month it has been. News of tragedy from back home. The skies here are threatened. It can feel like some great darkness is encroaching.
In the midst of it all, my 7-year-old son and I are working through a botany textbook. I had to get rid of all my houseplants when we left the field except for a handful that our language school cared for in our absence. I plan to propagate a new collection from those survivors (and to attempt an indoor herb garden). My son is going to help me. We’ll keep a plant journal together and learn a bit about how God cares for growing things and how we can join Him in that stewardship.
It’s not all about houseplants, though. We’ve gone to our local forest (whose soil is so sandy that only a few species of trees can grow there with almost no undergrowth). We’ve taken note of gardens and landscaping (if it’s in a straight line … probably not wild). The other day, I took him to an abandoned lot. It’s a shame, really. There are some lovely old buildings there, but they’re boarded up for now. We collected some wildflowers for his notebook and talked about how nature is reclaiming the space.
“You mean the plants want to tear down the building?” he asked. “Like, the plants are the bad guys?”
Something visceral welled up in me. Something primal and a little angry. He didn’t know that my mind was storming through the great dichotomy and all the ways our present age has twisted it — celebrating death, murdering new life, children falling out of fashion, euthanasia becoming posh, violence excused, and the brash, beautiful abundance of life becoming so distasteful because it doesn’t fit in with travel plans. His childish eyes looked at the trees and roots and vines and saw the enemy, and I wanted to rewire that notion.
So there on the sidewalk, with the metal and concrete of the city chasing and racing around us, I told him: “No.” The plants are not the bad guys. Those are living things. The buildings are dead. And life will always come to conquer what is dead.
The dead and man-made things are fine, but what living people aren’t using, what they aren’t tending — and even what they are, if they turn away for a moment — will be swallowed up, not by death, but by life.
Life wins and wins and wins again and will win for eternity. Christ has conquered death, and even though we live in a city of brick and hard, gray things, everywhere there is evidence of that eternal victory breaking in. Everywhere is something green, everywhere life shows off its dominance over the enemy.
“Because God is life,” he said, thinking on it.
“Jesus is the way, the truth and the life,” I confirmed.
Now he goes around pointing it out — moss on a dead stump, weeds in the paving stones. He’s rooting for the plants now. And it doesn’t matter how gloomy things appear in the skies or overseas. I know how the story ends.
Soon, I’ll take him to a place where the tree roots are ripping up the sidewalk. He’ll get a kick out of that.
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Megan Duda is a missionary serving in Eastern Europe. Her family recently returned to the field after a few months in the U.S.)
