Life after the freeze

The Russian in the room is always the wild card. Yes, this is a stereotype, and I say it with the utmost affection and respect. I spent two years in Russia; I love Russians; I have very close friends who are Russians and I think they would agree with me. They’re fun. I teach a basic-level ESL Bible class to adult learners in my city, and I have one older Russian lady in the class who can’t speak much English but always has a glimmer in her eye. I think she’s waiting for the moment when she knows the right words so she can jump in and spice things up. 

Sometimes I start class with a basic question like “what are you drinking?” The class is all online right now so I show them my mug of coffee in the camera, and they all toast back with their water bottles or cups of tea. One time I expanded the question to “what do you drink?” and this launched a discussion about different beverages. 

It didn’t take long at all before the Russian lady shouted out: “Vodka!” 

The other day I was teaching my class the story of Abraham. The verse we read included the word “outside,” which I didn’t want them to miss, so I asked the class to name some things we can see outside. “Trees,” someone said. “Cars. Sky.”

Then the Russian lady piped up in her priceless accent: “Khomeless enimals.” 

For a minute it reminded me of Family Feud where Steve Harvey looks up at the screen. “Let’s give it a try… homeless animals!” Then the buzzer goes off and a big red X appears. Sorry folks, that wasn’t one of our top 10 answers. 

But I remembered that the word for stray animals in Russian literally translates to “homeless animals.” She’s on the right track. Plus, she’s the exact demographic that I used to see sitting outside those huge Soviet apartment buildings feeding leftovers to hordes of cats. Feeding stray cats is one of the #1 hobbies of elderly women in all the former Soviet countries where I have lived. So I wiped the surprise off my face and tried to steer the class back toward an academic discussion on stray animals. As in, no human owner. 

“Yes!” someone chipped in. “Like birds!” 

Sigh. I didn’t want these poor confused students to run around the city all week talking about stray birds, so we had to spend a bit of time listing out types of wild animals versus stray ones. All this in an attempt to get through this verse: 

Then God led Abram outside and said, “Look at the sky. See the many stars. There are so many you cannot count them. Your family will be like that.”

Genesis 15:5 Easy-to-Read Version

I love God’s promise to Abraham. I’m sure Abraham didn’t love how long it took for God to fulfill it. Abraham made some mistakes along the way but he hung on and believed. I am also trying to hang on and believe that God has us on a journey toward life, toward raising children and seeing new generations rise up to know Him. 

When I look outside right now, I see a lot of death. Austin just got hit by an arctic blast that froze the whole city for more than a week (water mains broken, power lines down, limbs breaking, freezing rain crusting on top of snow, sheaths of ice on every surface, the whole gamut).

It was crazy because things like that aren’t supposed to happen here, so we have no snow plows or salt trucks. The roads were utterly impassable to most cars. I actually didn’t go to the grocery store for 14 days (and made it, thanks to In-Case-of-Quarantine Prepping 101 that we all passed or failed in 2020)! 

Now that it’s over, almost every house has bundles of tree branches at the curb waiting to be picked up. All that lovely manicured Saint Augustine grass in the neighborhoods is yellow and brittle. (I consider it a victory that our “natural lawn,” 90% weeds, is still mostly green!) Cacti are burst and rotting all over the place. My flowering things (I don’t know the name of these but it doesn’t matter now because they’re not coming back) are strewn along the ground like seaweed that washed up on a beach and dried out.

My pea plants that once proudly waved their white blossoms above a chain-link fence are now droopy, yellowed, dry little corpses. It’s carnage. I’m salty about this one because I planted peas two years in a row: one year they sprung up only to get scorched by the Texas heat and the next year they sprung up to get freeze-dried onto the fence. 

I planted carrots, but they never got bigger than a broken crayon because the tops kept getting eaten off by homeless animals. Er, sorry, wild animals.

Why even try around here? I’m frustrated by all the death. My next door neighbor is like a master gardener (she gets bushels of vegetables for canning) and starts seedlings indoors under a grow light. I’m sure nothing of hers died. 

Correction. I was talking to her outside and telling the sad tale of my pea plants when her preschool-aged daughter pedaled by on her bike. “Mommy’s plants died too,” she volunteered. I feel somewhat consoled by this. 

Anyway, sometimes this is how my fertility story feels, too. We try and try, and miscarry and miscarry. God is the giver of life and he promises life… why all this death? 

I actually stopped talking and sat down to listen to Jesus the other day. I told him how I feel and tried to sit in that, because I’m always rushing onwards to make it OK with glib statements like “…but it’s fine; I know you’re good and you write good stories; eternal glory and all that.” My head knows the truth but my heart can’t feel it. It doesn’t always help when I let my head rush in and save the day. Sometimes my heart needs to sit there in the sadness for a minute. 

I tried to ask Jesus what his intention is with me. Because I feel like parts of my heart are dying. And then I suddenly remembered the verse “unless a seed falls to the ground and dies…” 

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

John 12:24 NIV

A lightbulb came on. Death precedes life. A seed dies but the embryonic seedling inside digests the nutrients that it contained. That rotting seed becomes the very most fertile place for a plant to grow, a tiny pocket of nourishment for that little plant to start out its life strong.  

Yes, parts of my heart are dying. But they’re parts that need to go: self-sufficiency, impatience and control of timing, pride in being a relatively healthy person. And as they rot, God is turning my heart into a more fertile place for the future nourishment of “many seeds.” 

Those might be our biological children. They might be other children. They might be young adults we’re discipling right now. Or all of the above. I don’t know. But God’s intention is to bring life. And he’s doing that. All this death I see is progress in that direction. 

That’s why I’ve decided I don’t like the word infertility. This is not a journey of infertility. This is a journey of my heart becoming more and more soft and fertile so others can be nourished by its life. Yes, can you see these parts of me dying and rotting? This is ALL about fertility and life. Spring is coming, both in 2021 and in eternity, and it’s going to be glorious.