fruit from the secret place

I have something like 75 dahlia plants in my garden this year—the results of several hopeful midwinter tuber orders, plus my own efforts of digging, dividing, storing, replanting, and then overwintering my modest first-year setup. As we cross the threshold into the second half of October, every day that they’re still blooming is a cherished gift; a killing frost could be around any corner and the season will come to an abrupt end.

I’ve delighted in my dahlias these last few months, but to be honest, some of the plants have been a disappointment. They grew lush and leafy, but produced only one or two blooms all summer. In fact, one variety bloomed today for the very first time—and I had to check the tag on the stalk to even remember what I’d planted there. I had forgotten all about it since it blended in so completely with the foliage of the more prolific plants, overshadowed, losing out on the best sunlight to its neighbors.

I feel a bit like that dahlia.

I know that if I could just put out a flower, it would be beautiful—a gift from God to the world through my life. But somehow the conditions are never quite right, and camouflaging myself among the other greenery along the fringe is a lot easier than the amount of growing I’d need to do to reach my buds to the sun. Maybe it’s too late, anyway.

But do you know what happens when those lush leaves succumb to frost?

The invisible fruitfulness is revealed.

Underneath the soil, all summer long, even a flowerless plant (sometimes especially the flowerless plant) is busy replicating itself in the form of more tubers. These can be dug out, divided, stored carefully through the winter, and planted again in the spring—turning a single plant into anywhere from 5 to 20 more just like it. While my summer bouquets fill me with joy, garner lavish praise, and make all the work of growing and tending worthwhile, the real gold is only apparent to those who are willing to get down and mine it out.

It’s funny-looking gold—ugly brown roots, not unlike skinny sweet potatoes or a strange multi-legged sea creature. And it’s back-breaking labor—hours spent hunched over clumps of dirty tubers, looking for viable eyes and trying not to destroy any in the process of dividing them, mind going numb and hands cramping on the shears.

(Perhaps God feels the same when He’s trying to work with the fruit in my life. 🙃)

Suppose I never produce a “flower” with my life, yet still get the delight of growing in the presence of the Lord and abiding in His Temple? Suppose my purpose is to give life and love to my children—and suppose they get to bloom because of it? Perhaps my two daughters, whom I named “Bright and Beautiful” and “Flourishing in God’s Grace,” will get to flourish with bright, beautiful blossoms because I was faithful in the invisible things.

At any moment, a killing frost could turn all my discernible offerings into black slime. What’s left will be the work done in the secret place.

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.”

Psalm 91:1-2 NKJV

the heavens declare

The evening light wanes early now, summer pink fading to September grays and blues in pillows of dispersing raincloud. The silver half-moon is visible for an instant before being swallowed back up by the mist. The heavens declare.

On a clearer night, I would stay out longer in search of a sky striped with shooting stars or dancing with pillars of aurora—though it’s getting too late in the season for such an already-unlikely event. Still, God’s artistry is unbound by what is “likely.”

The heavens declare.

When I was a little girl roaming wide-open spaces under a cloudless wind-whipped sky, I looked often to the face of the mountain in the northwest corner of the horizon, thinking I might see the face of God there. That was the biggest object I had categories for, so in my mind, that was God’s domain, the closest visual I had to God Himself.

But have you noticed? In the Bible, God is not the mountain. God is on the mountain—in the cloud.

God is not an ancient face of rock, half-buried in glaciers, concrete and definable, conquerable by anyone with the will and stamina to try. And He’s not a momentary formation of cloud, shifting and changeable, enterable by anyone who can climb or fly high enough.

He is neither… and both.

Ancient, real, challenging, multifaceted, mysterious, pervasive, impossible to capture.

The heavens declare.

Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
    the sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
One day gushes the news to the next,
    and one night informs another what needs to be known.
Of course, there’s no speech, no words—
        their voices can’t be heard—
but their sound extends throughout the world;
        their words reach the ends of the earth.

Psalm 19:1-4 CEB

“Glory” is a strange word in Hebrew. Its source word, transliterated kabad, is a verb best defined as “to be heavy, weighty, burdensome.” Kabod is the noun version we translate “glory.”

The heavens declare God’s weightiness. His abundance. That He is not to be trifled with. Like the mountain, He is massive and immovable. Like the clouds in the expanse, He is mysterious and unpredictable. His own Creation reflects tiny pieces of who He is and what it means to enter into His presence. It is a heavy thing.

A heavy, wonderful thing.

And the Creation can’t help itself but invite us into the Creator’s throne room.

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

1 Kings 19:11-13 NIV

on golden calves

I doubt anyone is counting, but I can’t remember when I last attended an entire Sunday church service. I’ve made it to two Bible study classes and a couple of prayer meetings, and that’s all. Some of it is the summer busyness that is inevitable when one half of the extended family lives hours away; some of it is the standard scheduling mess that’s inevitable when one half of the parenting team is a shift worker; some of it is the reality that after 30 years of fairly automatic weekly attendance, simply going to church has become an activity I feel a lot of internal conflict about.

I had another uncomfortable realization last night (while lying awake with insomnia for the second night in a row) that I’ve often used church as a way to quiet the constant fear in my subconscious that I’m not really, truly following Jesus. After all, even when there is little genuine substance to my everyday relationship with God, I can fall back on the tangible reality that I go to the place and do the thing to make me feel better.

This is Pharisaism at its finest, and it comes very naturally to me.

And Pharisaism is a form of idolatry.

One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is when, while Moses is receiving the Law on the mountain, Aaron quiets the Israelites’ fear and unrest by helping them create a golden calf. He doesn’t say to them, “Here is a new god for you to worship, since the old one abandoned you!”—he says “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4, emphasis added).

At the very moment when the God of Israel was meeting with Moses on a mountaintop cloaked in cloud, Aaron and the assembly reduced Him to the tangible, accessible, visible form of a calf made out of gold. Their small minds needed to be able to go to the place and do the thing—to see “proof” that they were still blessed and protected and led by God, even if it was proof they literally created out of their own ornaments of slavery.

They made for themselves an idol.

Now when Aaron saw [the golden calf], he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” So the next day they rose early and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

Exodus 32:5-6

If the act of “going to church” is my tangible metric for whether I’m walking in step with God, have I not done the same?

God may be high above on the mountaintop, inviting me into the wonders of His presence and longing to teach me His wisdom, but I’m too busy bringing offerings to a false version of Him—created from the golden chains of legalism—to notice.

Or He may just feel distant and inaccessible right now, and this is a time to wait for Him to speak when He sees fit, and stop filling the silence with counterfeit worship to a counterfeit god.

I don’t mean church itself is bad or idolatrous, but I wonder if I’m the only one who’s guilty of shrinking the glory of relationship with the true God down to a measurable set of religious actions, or trying to contain His presence within the four walls of a three-dimensional building?

If we took those religious actions away and quit going to the building altogether, would there be anything left? If the answer is no, was there any relationship with God there to begin with, or was it all a carefully managed mirage?

Part of me has always felt a little guilty that my richest times of communion with God usually happen far away from church: on horseback rides, in my flower garden, wandering through open fields, at Twenty One Pilots concerts, in conversation with beloved friends or family over cocktails, in times of immense pain and grief, or watching while He shapes the minds and hearts of my two little girls in our most mundane daily activities.

But perhaps that’s exactly as it should be. Is He not in all of these things at least as much as He is in church? These are the real things that make up 98.9% of our lives, the things that go on between Sunday noon and the next Sunday at 10am. Going to the place and doing the thing once or twice a week is fine—and ideally it’s supportive of the goal—but going and doing are hardly the same as being and dwelling. Following the rules is not the same as living out a reborn heart. Feasting before a golden calf doesn’t mean you are worshiping the One True God.