Buried Seeds & Better Things
Today marks the one-year anniversary of when Josiah Wheeler’s close family and friends received the news that he had been taken from this world and welcomed into the next (though the real anniversary of his death is January 3rd, he was not found until January 4th). Recently I was asked to write an article on the topic “All Things New” for a periodical. What you are about to read is what immediately came to my mind in response to this prompt. I trust that those of my readers who are grappling with hard questions and searching for impossible answers will find this reflection a source of peace and comfort. In the words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ”
Long before my first day of kindergarten, two of my dear cousins appeared from behind our backyard playhouse and gave me the hard news. “We’ve buried your baby doll in the dirt.” Buried it. My baby doll. In the dirt. It was a very upsetting experience to me. Morganne and Patrick finally retrieved it for me, but the doll did not emerge unscathed (I mean, after all, it had been entombed beneath our black, Indiana loam).
Last January under a cold South Dakota sun, I stood among friends and family and buried a Seed. The men, some in their suits and Sunday best, others in their work boots and Carhartts, took turns shoveling the dirt into the six-foot gaping hole that yawned in front of me. They shoveled the dirt until it piled high on top of the Seed we’d placed at the bottom of that six-foot crevice.
I stood at the foot of that chasm, making no effort to keep warm though my body shook and shivered in the South Dakota wind. I’d forgotten my coat in the chapel in my rush to leave with the men carrying the coffin that contained my young, 17-year-old friend.
It’s easy to believe in all things being made new when you’re holding your next-door neighbor’s baby boy, born just yesterday. And you watch him grow up and babysit him and young life is as fresh as the spring.
It’s easy to believe in all things being made new when he graduates valedictorian of his high school class and heads to the Alaskan wilderness to start sharing his faith with unreached people groups.
It’s harder to believe in all things being made new when you’re standing at the foot of his six-foot grave and the men are shoveling dirt atop his young body. And you’re watching his parents and only sister weeping at the head of his grave as they plant their Seed. And salty tears stream down your own face as the soil is thrown over the Seed.
This is not fiction. This is real life. I am not alone in burying seeds. We’ve all done it in some form or another.
Burying seeds and watching them sprout makes sense in the springtime. It doesn’t make sense in the dead of January, when the ground is frozen under the snow and your fingers are numb, and the dirt is hard and cold.
But we buried our Seed, and my heart filled with doubt.
Filled with doubt about most everything. I had prayed and hoped and fasted for all things to be made new in my young friend’s life. Seventeen years is a long time. Seventeen years is long enough for deep hurts to be accumulated and misunderstandings to run rampant, and a young heart can feel old and worn and broken.
So I’d prayed for that young, 17-year-old heart to find healing and be young again. And I believed that healing would come.
But my young friend didn’t believe healing for his heart and spirit would ever come in this life. He told me so just two months before they found him, alone and lifeless in his isolated Alaskan cabin, a victim of acute carbon monoxide poisoning from a failed hot water heater.
Of the many doubts that seized and saturated and sabotaged my heart following the burial of our Seed, the most haunting was that a Better Resurrection wasn’t really true.
My young friend lies buried under the cold, South Dakota soil, and my heart became frozen with the belief that maybe the Seed we buried, maybe every single seed we ever bury, would never rise again. I couldn’t grasp the hope of a Better Resurrection.
Then I heard the words in a song:
“So hold on to the promise
The stories are true
My Jesus makes all things new
The dawn is upon you
Rise up, oh you sleeper, awake
The light of the dawn is upon you
Rise up, oh you sleeper, awake
He makes all things new
All things new” (1)
Long after the frozen ground had thawed and spring rains had soaked the soil, the words to the song began to take hold of my disbelieving heart — the heart that doubted the hope of the Resurrection, the cycle of dying seeds and sprouting life, the promise of a restored Creation.
Entirely unlike my cousins burying my baby doll, we choose to bury our seeds, seeds we once held high hopes for, seeds that were handed to us, and we have guarded with care. Yet, we are called to take out a trowel and a hoe and bury our seeds of dreams and hopes that have been destroyed by circumstances beyond our control. We bury the seeds, so they can be broken in the ground and die. It is only in that dark and dismal place that the seed can find the life that the pouring rain seeks to infuse within it.
And we await a Better Resurrection. Of course the life will emerge looking quite different from the seeds we once buried and laid to rest. The life will emerge perfect and restored and young.
But the seeds will emerge. And all things will be made new.
(1) “All Things New” lyrics by Andrew Peterson
(2) Josiah’s senior pictures: backyardstudios.zenfolio.com