and here goes a long one

by Sarah Edwards

Here’s a bit more about where I live this summer: turn right at the mailboxes, up the long gravel driveway to that one tidy house surrounded by chickens and sunflowers. There are always swimming towels cloaking the porch railing and leftover tubs of potatoes blocking the door and a wooden bowl filled with very specific napkin rings: if you see any of these things, you’re in the right place. I live with four other adults, none of whom I had ever met before I moved in, but nine weeks later they are a family to me. We each have a night to make dinner and a list of chores, a (highly contested) system of dishwasher-loading and streaks of nightly card-playing. Whenever anyone tells a story or piece of information, it goes through the cycle at least 15 times before it dies out of the conversation, and when anyone does anything slightly out of character (“WHAT YOU AREN’T GOING SWIMMING WITH US? WHERE ELSE WOULD YOU GO?”) it is a shock to the house system. We do almost everything together. Last night, for example, Franklin and Susan decided it was time that Lindsay and I learned to drive stick shift, so we took the truck and car down to a farm road. Taylor and Kelley, not to be left out, hopped into the back and laughed at us (and when Chris, a farm intern down the road, got home he just brought a cold beer out and leaned against the mailbox as we drove down the road, the truck jerking violently and the smell of burnt tires wafting out). It’s a small town.

But perhaps a better word besides family is community. These people are not related to me by blood and I have only known them for one season; there is nothing permanent about our arrangement: so for the present, they are my community, and that is a very rare and precious thing to have. There are four main people that I see when I first wake up and before I go to bed, but there is also Lindsay, the Week-Long intern, and Walker the Meat Farmer and Cameron his Homesteading Girlfriend and Blake the Townie, all the neighbors, and everyone else that comes through the house at a given moment. Living together, every flaw and quirk is noticed, and I am constantly humbled by the parts of myself that surface when living in an environment like this (but also when just…living). I talk too much when I get excited and interrupt other people,  I leave dishes under couches and put the granola top on wrong; when I plant seeds I am lazy and plant them crooked. I am needy; I am irritable. Also, it has recently come up for discussion that I apparently steal people’s plates when they aren’t finished and eat off them (note: I have no recollection of this).

But most of all, living within community has made me realize how little faith is a part of my daily life and how limited my definition of grace is.

The past few weeks I’ve been accidentally running into these conversations about faith. It certainly isn’t because I run towards them with my hands up in the air, because faith hasn’t felt like something I’ve openly gravitated toward this summer. It’s a good thing, as Megan says, that when I stop thinking about God, he doesn’t simply disappear. It shows how small my grasp of God is, that I think of him as if his existence depended on the amount of time I spend thinking of him (which is very little, compared to the amount of time I spend thinking about, for instance, what’s for dinner). Luckily, when I stop thinking about my Dad, he doesn’t just stop existing, and God, of course, is no different. He just is, whether or not I am small enough to comprehend Him.

As these conversations about God have happened,  I’ve found myself becoming so envious of my friend’s curiosity about the gospel. Curiosity is such a beautiful place to be in. Born, not just in the Bible Belt, but yee gad, into the Presbyterian Bible Belt; my parent’s bookshelf was never lacking in C.S Lewis, praying before a meal was as common as breathing and I can go into almost any church in North Carolina and play the six-degrees-0f-pastor-knowing and find a common denominator. Of course, this is also community and also beautiful, but it has also made things easy for me. I become not curious, I become not astonished by grace. Sometimes, I think it would be better to not believe in God at all, then to just go through the ordinary motions of my day as if God or faith or the big picture didn’t matter. Because it does; whether or not you believe it or don’t or haven’t connected all the dots. Any elemental belief I have in the universe ultimately affects the way I do, or don’t, choose to live my life. How easily I forget that!

The grace I give to and receive from my immediate community–for eleven more days!–matters. Susan talks a lot about being in community with land as well as people, and being in a garden every day for a summer, I begin to understand this. The Lord’s Acre is the most beautiful garden I have ever been in, but as Lindsay pointed out, the beauty of a community garden is that you have to remove your self-absorption from your efforts. The effort I extend to planting and taking care of things, ultimately comes out in a harvest, which isn’t intended for me. The food is for the food pantry, the moms that come into the garden; the welcome table. But even when I try to not be selfish or lazy in my gardening, any harvest, any really good-looking squash or row of beans, is an act of mercy. Agriculture is not an inherently natural act, and to receive anything from the ground is a gift. Grace does not mean that I will not mess up (and maybe leave my dishes under the couch again tomorrow, or mess up a friendship or do any of sinful things that come naturally to me) and to live under the shadow of that fear and guilt would be wrenching. But what I am learning that it does mean is that what and where and who I am given is an act of grace. And, as with the concept of a community garden, my trying to be better and plant rows of less crooked lettuce cannot be out of fear of punishment, but should be because what I’m doing is ultimately a gift and has some kind of result that affects the good environment around me. There is a certain understanding about grace, here, that had never quite clicked before I came: being here on earth is grace so therefore we should take care of it; being with others is grace so therefore we should take care of them. And that’s a whole new definition of sustainability, and community, to me.