This Skin I'm Living In

So, I'm thinking this morning, of starting a community garden in my backyard next spring. I'm not sure how to do it, but I figure it's worth a shot. It's a HUGE yard, one that will be difficult for me to maintain by myself, and unnecessarily large for one momma and her little person. I was reading bits and pieces of Geez, and got to thinking about living more intentionally and how that could look in my life.

One of the nice things about growing up a little, is the clarification of the ways in which you want your life to live itself out. "Youth, be damned", I say. It's overrated. I spent most of my twenties, frantic and worried about getting caught in a job that I would hate, wondering at why the hell I was living in Canada, about how to make decisions about my life that wouldn't only serve my own interests, but of those of the less fortunate as well, and about how to live out the truths of a sacrificial life in concrete ways, all while worrying about how in the world I could make any decisions regarding any future, when I didn't know what I really wanted my future to look like.

I've always had a bent towards radicalism: meaning, that I'm not good at doing things half way. I love drastic, spur of the moment changes, and I struggle with things that require piece by piece, year by year drudgery, er... commitment. Impatient, might be a good descriptor, with not really a Jesus complex so much as a Mary vs. Martha one.

Although my ex-husband and I had very different ideas about what our lives should look like, one of the things he was very good at doing was helping me live realistically. He reminded me that if I really wanted to serve, that there were plenty of people in Edmonton that could use a hand, and we didn't need to move half way around the world to help out. And of course, he was right. It just wasn't as easy, or as glamorous to devote my life to people I tried not to make eye contact with when I went into my favourite coffee shop, as those poor starving babies in the World Vision magazines.

But, you know you're growing up when... you realize that real faith is finding ways of living out your beliefs in the life that wakes up with you in the morning.
"Ah, yes," you say. "I already know that." And I knew it too, but I had such a difficult time with being satisfied with that. I worried that people who preached that kind of thinking, were making excuses for not living lives that reflected their beliefs. And to be honest, I still do, some days. I think I will always be a person with one foot out the door, ready to move across the world in an attempt to save it. But, I am finally finding that the more comfortable I become in my own life, the more holiness I am able to see in the living out, that I am doing here, and now.

So, I'm thinking about things like community gardens: small but concrete versions of how I can open up my life, to my life. If God is goodness, than God is in black dirt and growing things and sharing work and cups of coffee and open hearts - even if they are tentative and uncertain hearts, carrying tendencies to lurch about in stops and starts, running around in circles, but always, with the good intention and sincerity of trying to fly upwards.