Trusting the Deeper Growth

"Everything is gestation and then bringing forth."
---Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Responses are starting to come back to us from recipients of our Christmas letter expressing surprise -- and perhaps a small measure of envy -- at my "retirement" and our move to the country.  It is all warm-hearted, with the playful disapproval that I should take this step at my young age.  I don't tell them that the stiffness in my body each morning as I hobble out of bed doesn't feel all that young.  I simply try to clarify the larger truth in our move:  I can't have retired; my Pension Fund tells me I'm too young to do that.

The point, I try to explain, is not what I have stopped doing, but what I have started doing.  I also try to interpret how I don't feel like I have left the ministry, but have instead begun a ministry with a very different congregation, in response to a call every bit as powerful as the one that led me into pastoral ministry 30 years ago.  I understand that it is a clarification hard to comprehend; I'm not sure I get it all of the time, myself.  It is a distinction made even more difficult during this winter time when the only soil to cultivate is in containers on the shelves of the greenhouse.  Many days there is very little to show for my time apart from having dinner ready when Lori arrives home from work. 

But I am grateful for the quietness of these days, now that most of the boxes have been unpacked and the essentials made generally accessible.  I feel my own taproot pressing deeper into my soul, confident that just as important things are happening out of view beneath the surface of the ground out back, important things are happening within me.

Everything, after all, is gestation, whether or not we realize what all might have been planted.  Sooner or later -- perhaps even when we least expect it -- there will be a bringing forth.  Perhaps that's why I like the new logo we had created to graphically represent our new endeavor.  It's focus is on all that is transpiring beneath the surface, regardless of what might be showing above ground -- the deep roots and the peripheral initiatives emerging from them.  The focus is on the grounding, in recognition of the conviction that the sweetest fruit emerges from the deepest roots.