An Inconvenient Demand
On the morning of my birthday, I was forced to flee my home when a wild winter storm knocked two massive evergreens into neighbors’ houses, sent a third crashing down onto the power lines, and left a fourth leaning precariously over my apartment. This was not, to say the least, the birthday activity I’d had in mind, nor was it the start of the year I’d had in mind. Two weeks into January, I was still fresh with the thought that, maybe, this year would be different—that I would get out of the ruts I’d been stuck in, and that 2024 would not, like previous years, be a series of major and minor disasters. But a few days after I left, I received a photo from my landlady: that fourth tree had fallen and was now resting right on top of my apartment.
That was a month ago. I still haven’t returned home, my apartment having adopted what’s become the pattern of my existence: one problem begets another. The tree was removed, but caused minor roof and drywall damage, which turned into major water damage, which turned into my entire office and half my kitchen being gutted down to the wood. Meanwhile, I’ve been staying with my mother, sleeping on a twin-sized mattress next to her treadmill, my belongings gathered in grocery bags and strewn throughout the house. My many houseplants, I had to leave behind when I evacuated, but a friend and I managed to retrieve them and bring them back to my mother’s—or what was left of them.
Houseplants are primarily tropical plants, and so, they don’t take kindly to being abandoned in an unheated apartment in the dead of winter. The last four weeks have had me lopping off dying leaves and limbs and sticking healthy ones into jars of water and placing them under a grow light, in the hope that I can re-root them. My favorite, though, was beyond saving: a gorgeous dark purple calathea (or “prayer plant,” as they’re also called), which had been the centerpiece of my apartment. I’d bought décor and even painted a bookcase to match it. And when I told a relative I’d lost this plant, she smiled and said, “Well, you’ll just have to pick a new favorite then!”
I am not, to put it mildly, a “look on the bright side” kind of gal. A lifelong depressive, some days, it’s all I can do to get out of bed, let alone on the right side of it. And when things take a turn, depression devolves into despair—despair with a snarling, self-pitying edge, which pushes away both friends and God, so I can nurse my seeping wounds. I don’t want a new favorite plant or a fresh coat of paint or upgraded kitchen flooring. I want what I had—want, above all, to go home and cease living in a limbo that makes my order-centric brain smart and sizzle. I run and I walk along a backroad in my mother’s neighborhood, and I smart and sizzle at God: what is the point of belonging to You, when things like this can still happen?
Photo by Casey Murphy on Unsplash
A tree falling on my apartment, while not great, is not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and I have been a Christian long enough to know the answer to my own question: we are nowhere promised to be spared from trouble, but we are everywhere promised that God will be with us in it. But sometimes (too many times), despair is louder than truth, and my despair—already in overdrive from the disappointments and drudgeries of the last few years—does not want to “look on the bright side” or find comfort in having Jesus beside me. I want my God to move mountains, or in this case, the lagging schedules of construction workers. I want Him to do more than sit with me in the tiny treadmill room amidst bags of clothes and half-dead plants.
In John 14:26, Jesus said the Holy Spirit would bring to remembrance everything He’s told us, and I believe this applies to more than just Scripture. It’s surely no trick of my rage-addled brain that, in the midst of fussing and fuming, I begin to recall a poem I encountered last December: “Christmas and the Common Birth” by Anne Ridler. It begins with Ridler exploring how wrong it feels to celebrate Christ’s birth in winter, when all is dead and dreary, when celebrating in spring would make so much more sense. But then, she thinks again: Christ’s birth at this “iron senseless time” forces us out of the dead and dreary, or rather, forces us to hold these two opposites in equal tension. She writes, “For any birth makes an inconvenient demand.”
I had prayed for this year to begin with good change: a new job or a new love—a reason to look forward to getting up in the morning. Instead, I find myself peeling open a crusty eye in a room that is not my own and wondering if I can just stay in bed until conditions improve. If I’m honest, I was headed here even before the tree fell, the inertia of my life tugging me in and down into a stale hibernation. For me, Christ’s command to come alive in Him is nearly always “an inconvenient demand”—rarely do I feel like obeying, and certainly not now. And yet, I cannot help but think again of Ridler’s poem: “It is good that Christmas comes at the dark dream of the year / That might wish to sleep ever. / For birth is awaking, birth is effort and pain.”
Anne Ridler with her husband
How easy it is (for me, at least) to stay in darkness. How much safer it feels to curl inward, especially when everything outside of me seems beyond protecting. But what I know of Jesus is that He is uninterested in the easy route, for Himself or for His followers, and is instead determined, as Ridler puts it, “to force the glory into frozen veins.” Even so, though the crocuses and daffodils have begun to push their green shoots up out of the sodden soil, my heart and eye are still drawn to the bare branches—drawn especially to my beloved houseplants, in the sorriest state they’ve ever been in. My heart and mind, slow with trauma, are still struggling to find the glory in all of this, let alone the hope.
I began collecting houseplants during the pandemic. It started as something to do, then turned into a lifeline: a way to cultivate beauty and growth when the world felt full of anything but. And so it has been ever since. Though I have given up on myself time and again, the watering, the fertilizing, the pruning, and the tending have carried on, which makes the fact that most of these plants are now either dead or dying an even bigger blow. Nevertheless, though more yellow leaves seem to appear every day, and though I have the energy for little else, I still water, fertilize, prune, and tend—still give them a quarter turn every morning, so they can evenly soak up the meager light that finds its way to them.
“Did I not tell you,” Jesus said in John 11:40, “that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” How we want this glory to be a radiant blaze—one that ushers in a season of joy and peace and whisks our earthly troubles away. And sometimes, it does. But other times (most times), it is far subtler, far more like the gentle nudging that pries you out of bed, that gives you something—even a small thing—you can’t help but care about. “For any birth makes an inconvenient demand,” Ridler writes. “Like all holy things / It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end.” I sometimes wonder if the life of God in us isn’t more apparent in our dark, unholy seasons—if putting one foot in front of the other, in whatever way we can, isn’t one of the holiest things we can do.
Rooting a new plant goes like this: you slice off some stems, drop them in water, stick them under a grow light, and watch until (hopefully) tiny, glass-like roots begin to appear. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes, the stems turn to mush. But so far, mine are holding out, and after weeks of watching and waiting, those nearly imperceptible roots have started to show. And there it is, almost in spite of me: hope. To allow myself to feel it is a fearful thing, and when the feeling gets to be too big, too much, I set it down and carry on with the doing. Twice a week, I rinse the jars, refill the water, carefully replace the stems. Every morning, I check on their progress—perched, as they are, in someone else’s home, beneath an artificial light, intent on living on nonetheless.
