Enough for a Home—Amy Baik Lee

by Amy Baik Lee

One winter, when our two daughters were very small and the backyard was blanketed in a foot of snow, my husband seated them on a flattened cardboard box at the top of our sloping grass patch. He tugged the box downhill as smoothly as he could while they tried not to topple over in their plump coats.

Sometimes I imagine what would happen if the girls decided to replicate their first sledding experience now; if they were lucky, they’d slide about six feet before plowing into the wall somewhere under my reading chair.

I have, at times, dreamed of having a slightly bigger garden. To be sure, this one is larger than any of the apartment balconies or rental yards we’ve had before, and the ability to plant without having to ask a landlord for permission is a gift I never want to take for granted. But I’ve still allowed myself to daydream here and there, inspired by many who have done beautiful things with the land in their care. If I could acquire a one- or two-acre lot somewhere, I might plan out a garden divided into many rooms, like Monty Don or Julie Witmer—or I might plant a grove of trees some distance from the house so that when the wind swept through their leaves we could hear them roar like the ocean. In such a place, like the forest trail we walked a few weeks ago, you would probably be able to hear an entire chorus of birds cheeping from an amphitheater of branches on a still January afternoon.

But aside from the fact that moving wouldn’t be a wise financial decision for us right now, living here has given me ample opportunity to consider what it means to tend a place for its own good. Through the window beside my writing desk, I’ve noticed which flowers the red-waistcoated bumblebees and migrating hummingbirds prefer. I’ve realized which non-native plants I’ve been twisting the figurative arm of the land to grow, and which plants practically burst out of the ground on their own. A few years ago, a pair of marigolds I bought from a local farm flourished with such spirit that by summer’s end each little bush was covered in hundreds of seedheads. Gingerly I put a bag over the first plant, hoping to pull it out gently by its roots—but the roots came up faster than I expected, and I don’t know how else to describe the result than to say that the plant shattered gleefully into a hundred thousand black and yellow seeds all over the soil. I swept up as many as I could, but the following year still found me pulling up volunteer marigolds all through the growing season.

Not very long after the marigold episode, I read Anthony Esolen’s epilogue in Why We Create, which challenged me to think about what it meant to steward land rightly. Using the lens of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Esolen writes:

[M]an is meant by his Creator to be a maker, to give of himself lovingly in art that reflects the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of the world that God has given him. . . . So it is that Milton shows Adam and Eve to be artists in fact. With care and intelligence and love, under no specific command of God or oversight by the angels, they give new form to created things. Again, Adam speaks to Eve, and reveals to us what their innocent work is all about . . . It is to make the garden a garden for man: with arbors and alleys and clearings and shady recesses: not a violation of nature, but a fulfillment.

The last sentence helped my mind to link the concept of creation care with artistry and cultivation, and to view the pair for the first time as a responsibility. Under the creation mandate in Genesis, which Eugene Peterson paraphrases as “Fill Earth! Be responsible for the fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of the Earth” (Gen. 1:28 [The Message], emphasis mine), caring for land doesn’t mean simply letting it go wild; there is a listening involved, along with a responsive shaping, that takes the character of the allotment into account. There is no single correct design for the yard outside my window, but what plants and arrangements will honor its features along with the creativity of its owners? What will make it hospitable to the small creatures who fly or scurry in for brief visits? How can it be raised to “reflect the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of the world God has given [us]”? And if we manage to make it a place that offers a refuge to human beings, whom will it serve beyond ourselves?

With so much to ponder, I began to think that perhaps having more land wouldn’t necessarily be the boon I once imagined. Maybe even an acre would be a responsibility I could not take on; maybe I wouldn’t be able to care for it the way it ought to be cared for. By this time I could also see that having just enough to weed and water in the garden gave me time for other things I was supposed to be doing. I suddenly thought of a statement that C.S. Lewis made in Surprised by Joy: “I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.”

Lewis writes the line in the context of friendship versus “acquaintance and general society”; I now thought of it in relation to land. Why should I wish to own more land than I could tend well?

To be honest, I’m not naturally tempted to make more acquaintances or to own great swaths of property. But as I’ve continued my work both indoors and out, I have seen the relevance of Lewis’s opinion to a third area, one where I do often witness a siren call of “more”: writing.

I must tread carefully, I find, when I read advice for writers or from writers. This is a field where supply and demand seem to assign worth; the numbers of readers or followers or sales can feel like visible, reliable metrics that prove one’s words have served some purpose. I think it’s a miracle that letters and sentences strung together can resonate through hearts and minds, and I owe a great debt to generous souls who have told me that some thought or phrase helped them to go on. Their words have done the same for me. At the same time, sometimes I catch myself placing too much faith in those aforementioned numbers; it can feel like they equal the confirmation or withdrawal of one’s calling. They can even push my understanding of that calling in the wrong direction: I see how I could end up believing that a bigger readership will enable me to do what God has created me to do—but in a way that would make me forget, dismiss, or devalue the very people I’m writing for.

Recently I spent a day tracking down interviews about the writing processes of well-known authors. I have many of their impressive books on my shelves; they have challenged my assumptions, crafted memorable voices, and given me a rich return for my attention over multiple readings. They are books that have lifted my capacity for reason or empathy or language and “can lift [me] again,” as Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren discuss in How to Read a Book, with the ability to “go on doing this until [I] die.” These are often listed for recommended reading or considered part of the English-speaking canon.

But there is another class of works that I’ve realized I seek out more often: works that have gained a sort of dog-eared familiarity in my mind, usually because they lit a spark of hope at a needed time in my life and still bear the scorch marks of that kindling when I revisit them. (The two categories aren’t mutually exclusive; Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is just one example of a work that belongs to both for me.) As I listened to a song the other day that fit this description, I found myself quietly thanking God for “making a home for me” in the music of that particular artist.

The phrase came out of the blue. It made me look back over all the works I tend to return to like a sojourner who stumbles into a house having forgotten her name and her country. I come to them weary, even broken, and in their shelter I remember the homing cry that reverberates through the very marrow of my bones and all the crumbling corners of creation. I feel the vast and aching imminence of it, a haunting suspended chord waiting to resolve, and somehow it seems I can hear the voice of my king a little more clearly as I get ready to head out again.

These “homes” of song, story, and visual art have given me a hint about what it might mean for me to cultivate my own space well, whether physical or vocational.

When God issues his mandate to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, he has already set them an example by preparing a home: a home for the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, for the creeping and swimming and swarming creatures, for the man and woman themselves. This pattern of God preparing is scattered throughout Scripture: He sends an angel to guard Israel and bring the nation into the sites in Canaan that he has prepared (Exod. 23:20), the psalmist knows him to be a God who prepares a table before him in the presence of his enemies (Ps. 23:5), Christ himself tells us that those who are blessed by the Father will “inherit the kingdom prepared for [them] from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34 [English Standard Version]). The saints in Hebrews 11 who died with their faces toward a better country are now gathered to the One who confirms they did not hope in vain; “he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16 [ESV]). Even now, the Savior is preparing a place for us in the Father’s house (John 14:1-4).

This repeated theme of preparation by the Creator of the universe has led me to look at our tools and talents in a new light. Perhaps the elements entrusted to us—a place, a relationship, an artistic skill—only reach full fruition in our hands when we have made a home for someone or something else in them.

In my case with my writing, “homemaking” involves being faithful to the eucatastrophic story of Christ’s redemption—facing the raw brokenness of our world and condition with honest expression, but also being unashamed to write about the startling breakthroughs of God’s presence in a culture that has lost faith in happy endings. I tiptoe along my rough-hewn sentences, shaking and prodding them a bit to see if they will hold up the main tone I have in mind, because I hope in the end to create a roof under which another person can meet the One who is life. Over the last decade, I've been growing aware that the people I'm writing to are immortals, as Lewis points out in “The Weight of Glory”; they are people for whom my words will either be a help or a hindrance, however slight, in following Christ.

If this is the task before me, then it seems like a mark of incomprehension to ask for more writerly renown (or territory, or contact with other lives) than I can steward faithfully—a bit like Andrew Ketterley when he dreams of setting up petty business ventures and health resorts while Aslan is singing Narnia into life. Why should I aspire to sublet more of my Father’s harvest ground than I can work with heartily? I have co-laborers at work in the world with their own commissions and gifts, and there are so many needs and wounds to be addressed.

I do not mean to imply that small means virtuous. One can mismanage two dollars as thoroughly as one can two million; the specific number isn’t the real issue. I can think of several artists who I believe are caring for their large audiences well. But it sets my understanding right side up to acknowledge that the privilege of having someone’s attention is a stewardship and not a possession. It is a sober and glorious undertaking to look for the image of God in our fellow human beings, and to refuse to commodify or anonymize them. In the kingdom of the Son of Man, asking for “more” is really a request to kneel and serve . . . more.

All this makes me think that my prayers would do well to follow the pattern of Proverbs 30:7-9: “[G]ive me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you . . . or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God” (ESV). Give me the feast of enough.

Do not give me more good—more acreage, more relationships, more readers—than I can handle as a servant and as a child of joy. The garden and the writing have been private sanctuaries of worship and ministry to me, and you know the delight I have taken in working with sound and atmosphere and beauty under your hand. But when it comes to my outward yield, whatever professional or popular counsel may have trained me to seek, let my portion be commensurate to the home it may provide for others.

Let me not envy those to whom you have given different responsibilities, and of whom you will require things I cannot see. Help me grasp the surprising breadth of the resources I’ve already been given. Help me bend my wits and background and sensitivity to listen long to this garden, this intersection of relationships, this readership, that I may learn to love them as you do.

Make a home in my work—in my words, music, meals, wherever you please—where a tired traveler may look out the window to the coming dawn and remember we are but a night’s watch from seeing you. Bless them with a burning hope in the low light as they set out again—even as I ask you to bless me with the same elsewhere as I sojourn in another’s house.

Thank you for the many doors left open by your people on this road Home.

It is a prayer fit for the corner where my little desk stands, where I’m gaining the sight to see the right-sized plot before me for the gift that it is. Here, the young maple tree calls my attention to its spring waking because it stands right outside my window. The cosmos plants bloom and seed with abandon all over the grass patch because they love the dry climate and poor soil; the house finches walk along the winter-crisped stems like tightrope artists, inching their way to spiny clusters of seed.

Here, in a month or two, while I stumble on in drafts and supplication, one of those wee birds will fly up to find a perch at the very top of the elm tree. Its frail feet will cling to a single budding branch. And with a clarity that pierces walls and windows below, it will sing the mad, jubilant song that never fails to remind me of the newness that is about to fill the earth.

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Amy Baik Lee is the author of This Homeward Ache, a columnist at Cultivating Magazine, and a literary member of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. A lifelong appreciator of stories, she holds an MA in English literature from the University of Virginia and still “does voices” when she reads aloud. She writes at a desk that looks out on a small cottage garden in Colorado, usually surrounded by her husband’s woodworking projects, her two daughters’ creative works, and patient cups of rooibos tea.

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