Cultivating Fatherhood is a space made for the dads among us who love their kids and yet know that the adventure of parenting, with all its joys and beauty, can also be a perilous one. Make no mistake, showing up for your kids is beautiful, rewarding, hard, holy, brave work. My efforts are here intended to provide encouragement and understanding that equips us for our responsibility to the amazing beings who call us “dad.”
There is a gentle but almost defiant courage in how my wife tends her orchard during the drought that Colorado finds itself in yet again. The heavy clay soil here already has cracks and splits before her boots touch them as she walks between the rows of small trees she planted four years ago. Long mounds of dirt extend across the hillside with moat-like trenches dug along their base so that what little rain runoff we get can be collected near the base of the trees and consumed by their thirsty roots. She built a drip irrigation system to honor water restrictions and route the precious resource to where it’s needed most. We pray for rain.
And yet, in Colorado, freezing temperatures are sporadically possible until about Mother’s Day. When moisture does come, it can come in the form of hail or snow or a frost that kills the flowering buds. The moisture that at a different temperature would have facilitated the process of flower turning to fruit now kills the flower; it denies her and our children the literal fruit of her labor.
On top of all that, when the fruit does come, there’s the wildlife to contend with. Aside from the danger of rattlesnakes hiding in the tall grass, the deer and rabbits nibble buds, rub antlers on branches, and eat the fruit before it ripens and can be picked. They experience the drought as well, and for them, the diligent work of my wife feels like an oasis of abundance. Their feast contributes to our famine.
In moments like these it’s easy to think back to the words God spoke to the first Adam after the fall.
“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”
—Genesis 3:17b-19 NKJV
“Cursed” can feel like a fair description when the work feels so hard and the harvest feels so fruitless. The elements themselves seem to be unable or unwilling to lighten the load.
The world feels … well, it feels like the soil in our orchard—dry, cracked, and even dangerous. “Thorns and thistles” grow in our politics, in our communities, and in our own hearts. Injustice asserts itself like locusts eating what has been so carefully cultivated. Tensions and temperatures—both environmental and emotional—are on the rise. Finding common ground with another person can feel as elusive as keeping topsoil from drying to dust and blowing away.
I grieve for my own sake, but at times I despair for the sake of my children, who will inherit a world that seems to be heading toward a place that concerns me greatly. Hearts can grow hard just like the ground when the environment is not conducive to nourishing growth. Like tending an orchard in a drought, it is a brave thing indeed to tend the hearts of children in times such as these. But how?
There was a day when the heaviness of life was getting to me, and it showed. My wife needed us to stop at the store on the way home from church, so we pulled into the parking lot and I told her I would wait in the van. My oldest son went with her, my youngest jumped around the back seat, and my daughter crawled up into the passenger seat next to me. After a bit of silence, she softly asked:
“Dad, are you OK?”
I wrestled with what my responsibility to her was in this moment. If I tried to pretend like I wasn’t sad, I would worry about what that would say to her about the legitimacy and appropriateness of feeling her own emotions. And yet, I didn’t want to place the weight of my concerns on her shoulders, either. My best effort in the moment was to honestly acknowledge that I was feeling sad but to let her know that being sad was OK sometimes. The problem was, I wasn’t just sad. I had slipped into despair, and my despair would have also been a threat to the growing fruit in her life.
Merriment is not a way to bypass uncomfortable feelings. It is a choice to see the goodness of God even in the midst of all that is not good around us. So, in that moment when we were aware of things that were wrong, we chose to see how everything could joyfully point us toward what was right.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s play the ‘Why Is That Beautiful’ game.”
She looked at me with a confused expression.
“I’ll point to something we can see in this parking lot, and you have to tell me why it’s beautiful.”
She thought it was strange, but she was game.
“How about …” I looked around. “That lamppost.”
“Um … because it gives light?”
“Yep! It allows people to come to their cars safely in the dark after shopping! OK, now you pick something for me.”
“OK. Um … that sign.”
“Signs are helpful ways to share important information with people. That one helps people know where to put their carts so that they aren’t cluttering up the parking lot and so the store workers can easily collect them for others to use! Now yours is … that piece of trash!”
She gave me her very practiced “Dad, you’re being a stinker” look.
“Come on, kiddo! You can do it! Why is that piece of trash beautiful?”
“Because people were able to buy something?”
My daughter found beauty in a discarded piece of trash because, for all its other faults, litter was a marker of abundance. Wow!
Our game escalated into more and more difficult things, trying to stump one another, and yet somehow, there was always a glimmer of grace to celebrate.
“OK Dad … pollution.”
“Ooo … Hmm… Well…”
She thought she had me there.
“I think …” My wheels were turning out of a (perhaps-misplaced) desire not to be stumped. “Well, when we see the effects of our disregard for the world around us, when we see the harm our carelessness causes to the natural world, it is a gift of God to reveal this to us.” I went on to explain that if we did harm but never saw its effects, we would never think to make a different choice, we would never care and learn and do better next time.
Or, as J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote:
A divine “punishment” is also a divine “gift,” if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make “punishments” (that is, changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained. [1]
It is brave and beautiful to tend an orchard in a drought. It is brave and beautiful to care for creation even when the consequences of our historic disregard can seem so overwhelming. It’s a brave and beautiful thing to raise God-honoring children in times such as these, as fraught and fearful as things may get. It is a brave and beautiful thing to learn from our mistakes, and an even braver thing, in all things, to keep trying. And in all of the complicated messiness of life, it is brave indeed to speak to our hearts again and again that the “thorns and thistles” do not have the final word.
Creation is bookended by two trees, or rather, the same tree. One day we will be reunited with the Tree of Life. And one can only assume that our sojourn of scarcity away from it will make its fruit taste all the sweeter. We will no longer have to practice courage or try to come up with ways to “find something beautiful” around us. It will be before our very eyes, in our hands, in our mouths, and running down our chins.
One day we will see the glorious undoing of what humanity undid. And the lushness of that world to come will heal and restore all that drought and death has dried up. That merry hope is why, even in a drought, we can still cultivate. That is why in a harsh world we can still tend the hearts of our children. That is why we can still repent and try to get better as a species and as individuals. That is why, even in the midst of drought, merriment is a nourishing and appropriate response.
[1] The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, 2000
The featured image is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Adam Nettesheim is Director of Fellowship for The Cultivating Project, and a columnist for Cultivating magazine. Through writing and illustrating, Adam seeks to pull on the golden thread that leads us Homeward. Adam is a ‘Multi-Media Specialist’ by day at a municipality in Colorado but his most important (and favorite) work is husband to his wife Sarah and father to his 3 children. His writing (and a few other things) can be found at https://adamrnettesheim.com/.
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