Jessica Lynne Henkle

NONFICTION

Seeds

During the Covid lockdown, like most people in America, I tried to take up gardening—a short-lived enterprise in which I learned that, just because I planted something, this did not mean it would grow. Too many elements were out of my control: the sun (or lack thereof), the ivy-ravaged soil, the vast and varied bugs, not to mention the squirrels who treated anything I brought into the yard as a new addition to their salad bar. It wasn’t long before I gave up and turned my attention to houseplants, whose environment I could more easily curate and with which I’ve had far better success.

But I still remember the first thing I planted: wildflower seeds. I labored to yank the tangles of ivy out of the one corner of my yard that could have possibly become a garden. I fertilized the arid dirt. I followed the instructions on the seed packet, and I watered diligently, nourishing visions of a three-tiered oasis bursting with color. It took a number of weeks, but those seeds began to sprout. And I was thrilled. I checked on them every day. But then, for whatever reason, they withered and died before making it more than an inch or two out of the ground.

Earlier this year, I wrote out the King James translation of Psalm 126 on three Post-its and stuck them to my kitchen cupboards. It goes like this:

When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them.
The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.
Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south.
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

It is, perhaps, one of the more familiar psalms, if only for the line “they that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” But there was something about the way the whole thing read in the KJV that caught me—something that catches me still. Is this a memory, or is this a prayer? Is the poet speaking of things he longs to see happen or of things that already have? Or is it both? Is he looking to what the Lord has done in the past to draw out hope for what he wants Him to do in the not-so-distant future?

I turned thirty-six this year, and being somewhat obsessive about numbers, it’s struck me ever since that I have now lived as long as an adult as I did as a child. I’d say the cliché thing about “I don’t know where the years have gone,” but I know exactly where they’ve gone: to college, to graduate school, to two long-distance moves. To the gaining and quitting of many jobs, the finding and losing of not so many men. To the deaths of my father and both of my grandmothers. To countless hours, often squeezed into whatever crack or crevice I could find for them, of reading and writing.

When I finished high school, all I wanted was to get married and publish books, but despite the numerous things I have done in these last eighteen years, I haven’t yet managed either of those. Dreams can change as we grow; it’s true. But mine have not. They’ve shifted shape and form, and yet, their cores have remained unaltered. I’ve shifted shape and form, God knows, and my core has been altered, too. The fledgling faith I had as a teenager and young adult has grown into something mighty indeed: a well-rooted tree I can roost in and know no storm can rip it from where it stands. God knows, many a storm has tried.

But God also knows the seeds I sowed beneath this tree—seeds I have labored over and brought to Him again and again—and they are the same seeds I bore as an eighteen-year-old, hurtling myself into the world like no one and nothing could ever stop me. They are the seeds I would like most to see grow, and they are also the seeds that, no matter what I do or how I pray, I cannot seem to make grow. “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy,” the psalmist writes. Sometimes, I feel as if I’ve sown these seeds with nothing but tears, and yet, while I have reaped many good things, I cannot say that “joy” has been among them.

In 2018, Audrey Assad released an album called Evergreen. The title track has a refrain that goes, “Evergreen, evergreen / The tree of life is evergreen.” In an interview, she said she wrote this song after learning that, in some Jewish traditions, the tree of life is thought to be a sycamore fig tree, which is towering and expansive and, yes, evergreen.* That idea struck Assad, and it strikes me, too—strikes me in the way so much about Jesus and about belonging to Him strikes me. That He remains faithful even when we are faithless. That no matter how many of our earthly seeds fail to flourish, the Source of our existence, both temporal and eternal, is evergreen.

It isn’t true, what I said—that I haven’t reaped any joy. I haven’t found it in the places where I want to find it, but still, it has come upon me, almost in spite of me. Like dandelions in the sidewalk cracks, it springs up when I’m feeling foul and crusty, and all it takes is a rush of wind through the trees or a beam of sunlight through the clouds, and suddenly, there’s the truth I can’t escape: this is still God’s world, all of us and everything in it, and it is threaded through with His touch. In “The Great Dance,” Frederick Buechner writes, “God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy …. We have God’s joy in our blood.”**

It is a joke among anyone with a religious education that, when instructed to choose and memorize a passage of Scripture, you were never allowed to pick John 11:35 because it’s the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” But what multitudes are contained in those two words. The Son of God stood outside the tomb of His friend, whom He loved, and He wept with that man’s family. In Noah’s time, God looked upon the world He had created and the evil we had done in it, and His “heart was filled with pain” (Genesis 6:6 NCV). If we have God’s joy in our blood, as Buechner suggests, perhaps we also have His sorrow, and perhaps part of becoming one with Him is to experience the inextricable intertwining of these two states of being.

“Evergreen, evergreen,” Assad sings. “The tree of life is evergreen.” Do our desires matter to God? Of course. Do I still pray every day (sometimes, multiple times a day) that these seeds I have borne for the better part of forever will bear fruit? Yes. But I think the fruit that matters just as much, if not more, is the fruit the Spirit has somehow, in spite of me, caused to flourish within me, and that is the fruit that has learned to find Him in the most unlikely places—that has learned to trust Him, no matter what. It is a fruit that has come, I am convinced, because it, too, has been sown in tears: the long and lonely nights and days that have brought me closer to the Man of Sorrows and, paradoxically, to His joy.

I think Psalm 126 is a hope and a prayer. I also think it’s a memory, the way a vivid dream or a long-cherished vision can come to feel like a memory—the way not seeing it realized can make you feel like a captive in your pain. And I think the poet is doing with this prayer, this dream, the only thing he can do: bring it to God. He speaks of what he hopes for, asks the Lord to make his vision a reality, and concludes with what he knows to be true, regardless of what answer may come: they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He who is open-hearted and open-handed enough to bring his most precious seeds to the Lord shall doubtless return with his arms full.

*“Audrey Assad Releases ‘Evergreen’ Amidst 5-Star Acclaim,” TheChristianBeat.org, February 25, 2018, https://www.thechristianbeat.org/audrey-assad-releases-evergreen-amidst-5-star-acclaim/.

**Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 240.

Jessica Lynne Henkle has a BA in English and art history from Boston University and an MFA in writing from Pacific University. She runs, works, and prays in Portland, Oregon, where she’s always writing something. You can visit her at jessicalynnehenkle.com or follow her on Instagram @jessicalynnehenkle.

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Artwork: Woman in the garden, vintage illustration, hand painted calendar, month of March. Public Domain.