Experiment 12: Embrace creative destruction.
Photo Credit: Courtney Smith on Unsplash
The tiller’s teeth tear into the patch of soil that last summer was so overgrown, a neighbor felt compelled to chop down its waist-high weeds when we weren’t looking. Armed in weed-eating goggles and gloves and old basketball sneakers, my husband Dagi grips the handles of the roaring machine spitting out dirt and crushed leaves and hacked roots. A couple of summers ago, my then 91-year-old grandpa fished out the antique tiller from my grandparents’ garage when I asked if we could borrow “something that could break up soil.” We were dreaming of turning a patch of weeds into a beautiful garden.
A Divine Shaking
Though perhaps best known for the verse Be still and know that I am God, Psalm 46 is a violent song. The earth implodes, mountains topple into the sea. Nations rage, waters foam, chariots burn. What caught me by surprise reading it recently was a disconcerting verse whose inconvenience I’d perhaps ignored before: Come behold the works of the LORD, / How He has brought desolations to the earth (ESV). When I think of beholding God’s works, I imagine standing on the beach in a cozy hoodie watching the sunset blaze into Lake Michigan or marveling at the stained glass wings of a butterfly. But this verse states that God Himself brings desolations–devastation, ruin, consternation, dismay, horror, waste*--to the earth. How could the God who is light and holds no darkness be the one shoving mountains into seas and shaking the earth like the blades of a tiller (1 John 1:5)?
The violence of Psalm 46 reminds me of Isaiah prophesying about Jesus: Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain (40:4). When Jesus comes, Isaiah says, the foundations of known reality will shift. Once familiar markers and guideposts (animal sacrifice, adherence to the Levitical law) will crumble. Mountains will tumble into sea-depths. The earth will tremble.
God’s presence, by its very nature, can disorient, discombobulate.
Terrify.
But it can also create. In Isaiah 40, Jesus’ presence restores wilderness. His approach heralds, not the annihilation of the world, but its remaking. In Psalm 46, God shatters spears and burns chariots to build peace. What is more, God’s desolations are called “works.” Something made. Something created. Something creative. Something to attend to, to behold with awe. Something redolent of the awe-ful presence of God.
To create a garden of an overgrown weed patch, thistles must be uprooted, hardened soil must be broken. Creative destruction must be embraced.
In this season, pieces of my life have been breaking. Waiting for a second child is shattering my vision of what I thought my family would be. Raising a three-year-old, my illusions of my own goodness have been crushed like leaves in a tiller. (My response to sopping up two potty-training messes in one evening destroys any delusion of my own perfection.) In reading the Gospels as an adult, my flannelgraph images of Jesus have disintegrated, and I sometimes feel lost seeking a God who seems more inconceivable and elusive, more near and tender with passing time.
The Present Gardener
Yet, Psalm 46 gives me hope.
All that is breaking in my life is evidence of a divine Gardener close, present–and working. The painful shatterings are not for my destruction–but for my flourishing. What appears to be highly inefficient–even backwards–is movement towards a grand orchestration of a coming kingdom I cannot yet see. What seems to be devastation and ruin and waste is part of a creative process, a deeply mysterious alchemy whereby God takes the fragments of my brokenness and forms something of enduring beauty that reaches far beyond myself.
As Paul writes, suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Rom. 5:3-4).
Though I don’t understand how,
Though I can only feel the blades in my back,
Though I am blind in the depths of my own darkness,
I can have faith that the mess of my life, if given to God, can yield the sweet fruit of goodness for His glory. I can take heart in the truth that the Creator–that genius Artist who paints the oriole’s breast vermillion and spoke the peony’s fragrant breath into being–this God who began a good work (pressing the tiller’s blades into the root-strangled soil, uprooting deep-set weeds), will complete it (Phil. 1:6).
The breaking is part of how I am made whole.
I will be made whole.
One day.
Rather than shirk the blade (the toddler who will not stay in bed at ten o’clock at night, the dark revelation of my own pride), I can be still and accept it.
Be still.
Still, like a rooted bloom, unfurling.
* https://biblehub.com/hebrew/8047.html
This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.
