Fruitfulness, Round Four

Last week, post-yard-sale and some back labor excitement, Papa picked tomatoes from the garden. This is what the counter looked like after I'd cleaned half of the take from three five-gallon buckets.

As they say up here: Uff-da.

Suffice it to say, we've had a bumper garden harvest this year. Since early August, I've been freezing green beans, sweet corn (not from our garden but from three different church members--sweet corn had a good year here, too), preparing eggplant and squash and cucumbers, and this month we've been tackling the pepper and tomato haul. Yes, it's been a lot of work. We're also very thankful the garden has borne such bounty, especially considering the late spring and the fact that we were gone for four weeks after Papa planted. So Nancy, if you're reading this and still at all concerned that your watering efforts in July went to waste, please, PLEASE fret no more. God used your efforts to great success. In fact, our tomato load last week was the fourth round of our tomato haul. The first resulted in twelve pints of hot salsa and seven quarts of tomatoes in their own juice. The second begat twelve pints of mild salsa and multiple quarts of peeled, frozen tomatoes. The third produced over twelve gallons of frozen tomatoes (see how my energy with each round diminished?). The fourth round, by sheer size alone, demanded extra effort.

So last week when I decided to make tomato sauce with all two-thirds of Papa's latest picking, I had a lot of time to think about garden harvests and familial blessings. Sitting in the kitchen, destemming and slicing up countless tomatoes for what turned out to be over ten quarts of sauce (which, if you've done this before, means roughly sixty pounds of tomatoes were involved), and wincing every time Baby decided to make his presence known (the guy's running out of room!), I pondered the mysteries of fruitfulness.

Papa's planted a garden every summer we've been here, and we've had some good years. He's rotated placement, Miracle-Gro-ed, swapped out different varieties of produce, tried different spacing. He's tried onions and radishes with little success. This year, he tweaked again, but not enough to account for the haul. Our backyard neighbors planted a few tomato plants scarcely twenty feet from our garden and didn't get a single tomato for their work. Yet we planted and basically left the little green squirts alone and now find ourselves inundated.

It's not fair, in the whole scheme of things. I'm ten months pregnant. Why all this work at this particular time? But what a silly response. I could dwell on the effort such bounty requires to preserve and sustain, but that seems beyond ungrateful. It doesn't even make sense. Gardens by their very nature are supposed to produce. And when they do, we give thanks. On the flip side, our bounty seems unfair to all the gardeners who spend this month wondering what went wrong. It would seem judicious if everyone got at least a little something for all of their gardening efforts, but sometimes it just doesn't happen. Sometimes the rabbits and birds wreak havoc. Sometimes the weather soaks or scorches. Sometimes seeds and seedlings just don't take due to soil or weeds or for causes we can never determine. Experts have spent and still spend countless hours attempting to explain why things grow and why they don't. But even finding reasons why things don't grow can't suddenly make them grow. Even having all kinds of scientific answers as to how and why life can happen can't actually create and sustain life itself.

Gardens are one thing; families and children quite another. I think of my friends and others whose arms and hearts ache with emptiness, from children desired and children taken to Jesus. Like agricultural scientists and researchers and farmers, doctors and specialists can only explain so much. This is not to diminish their God-given expertise and aid in any way. It is only to say that they are not God, and they cannot act as Life-creater. Sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking they can be, that technology or drugs or some combination of scientific theory and practice in the hands of certain people can do what only God can do. But we also see too much suffering and tragedy to believe such a lie. Seemingly healthy children die young. Healthy women are infertile. And children who should not statistically survive do. My sister and I are such exceptions. We were born over thirty years ago at  twenty-eight weeks gestation. We were given less than a ten percent chance of survival at birth, but we both did. And only God knows why. We can speculate, of course. But the truth is that we don't know. And we can only trust that God's ways are best, even when we don't know His reasons for life or for death, for fruitfulness or for barrenness.

Such may sound glib or callous, an easy write-off for unanswerable burdens that provides no comfort. Instead, it is a life-saving trust in a sea of loss and suffering. We pray a meal prayer sometimes that begins with verses from Psalm 145: The eyes of all look to You, O Lord, and You give them their food in due season. You open Your hand; You satisfy the desire of every living thing (14-15). We give thanks for the nutrients God provides us for our bodies. We acknowledge that only He can give us what we need, when we need it, be it food or health or children or any number of gifts. And ultimately, whether we like it or not, we bow to the inevitable scarcity or abundance that He provides, as He sees fit. We don't like this, because it means our efforts mean, well, nothing in the face of whether God withholds or blesses.

But we also know that His gifts are always good. His good gifts always satisfy our greatest need--that we need Him, that we are, in fact, completely helpless apart from Him. And He provides for us in multiple ways, too, just not always in the forms we desire or expect. Neighbors bring extra asparagus and apples (or get five-gallon buckets of tomatoes). Some years are corn-heavy and tomato-light. Some arms hold one child or two or many, biological or adopted, and others hold nieces or nephews or godchildren or congregational children. Regardless, we receive. And--this is a hard truth--if God ordains that we should bodily starve or bear the cross of barrenness or loss, we trust that His ways are not our ways, His care not ours. This is a terrible truth, but one on which our very lives depend. Abraham wielded a knife over his only son. Mary watched hers be pierced and nailed and suffocate and die. Both wept and ached and suffered. But none more so than He who made them to begin with, Who bore and bled and died and rose to give us life that would never end, that would never stop giving.

Our family waits and prays in these days for God to bless us with another child, who is our fourth living one. This baby has grown unseen and mostly unknown, though we cherish our time with his kicks and his hiccups, even his sunny-side up turn. God knows the days He has prepared for this little one, and we trust in His promises for us and for our child, that He will never leave us or foresake us, though we all will pass someday from this veil of tears. And so we give thanks for His mysterious bounty, in all of its forms. Bless us, O Lord, and these Your gifts, which we receive from Your bountiful goodness. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Giving Thanks for Life.

I've been struggling for a few weeks to deal with some thrice-removed stresses--that is, things that bother me that 97% of the time don't directly affect me or my family's daily life but which still matter to me because they deal with people that matter to me. I know worrying is wrong. Yet I've spent far too much time turning thoughts and comments and incidents over and over in my head, trying to understand them and, in a weirdly existential-cum-physical way, fix them by understanding them.

Then God smacked me with reality and perspective.

A dear, dear friend called last Wednesday. This friend and I have shared countless joys together--college achievements, engagements, marriages, the births of our children. One particularly poignant joy we have had is to share pregnancies--we've been pregnant at the same time with our kids. She just shared with me about a month ago that they were expecting again, so we'd be pregnant together again for the third time. We've joked that perhaps we'll actually hit the same due date someday.

My friend called to tell me that she and her husband lost their third child to miscarriage.

She told me she thought about waiting a day to tell me since we were planning a visit for Thursday. Our visit turned out to be vastly different than what both of us had anticipated--shared joy at being together, shared sorrow at the loss they suffer. And in the midst of our friends' incredible grief, they showed us how to give thanks for life.


Thursday night, my friend's husband led us in prayer. He began by reading Psalm 51. When he reached "in sin did my mother conceive me," his voice broke. Then he prayed with thanks for what God has given us and what He has taken away. And his simple petition reminded me that we are so thankful for all of life, from the long and full-lived to the short and not-yet-visibly lived. We do not see how God will use our friends' precious child's life to His glory. But He loves that child more than we can ever comprehend. And He loves our friends, and their broken spirits, more than we can ever comprehend.

My friend has been blessed with a vocation outside the home in which she serves others. And in the midst of her shock and wordless tears, she was able to see and articulate how God will use their loss for others' gain in her vocation--that she will now be able to better understand and empathize with women she sees and visits with who have also lost children to miscarriage. She essentially was giving thanks for her child's all-too-brief life, for that life will bless her with deeply insightful care for others that she otherwise wouldn't be able to provide.

God is mysterious. His ways are not our ways; His work in our broken world is hidden from us. And we can't even begin to understand or fix our brokenness. So the greatest mystery of all is that He gave His Son's life for ours so that none of us--our spouses, our children both born and unborn--would die. He has numbered the hairs of our heads and all of our days. He loves us with an everlasting love.

Have mercy on me, O God,
   according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
   blot out my transgressions.
² Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
   and cleanse me from my sin!
 ³ For I know my transgressions,
   and my sin is ever before me.
⁴ Against you, you only, have I sinned
   and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words
   and blameless in your judgment.
⁵ Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
   and in sin did my mother conceive me.
⁶ Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being,
   and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
 ⁷ Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
   wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
⁸ Let me hear joy and gladness;
   let the bones that you have broken rejoice.
⁹ Hide your face from my sins,
   and blot out all my iniquities.
¹⁰ Create in me a clean heart, O God,
   and renew a right spirit within me.
¹¹ Cast me not away from your presence,
   and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
   and uphold me with a willing spirit.
 ¹³ Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
   and sinners will return to you.
¹⁴ Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,
   O God of my salvation,
   and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.
¹⁵ O Lord, open my lips,
   and my mouth will declare your praise.
¹⁶ For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
   you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
¹⁷ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
   a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
 ¹⁸ Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
    build up the walls of Jerusalem;
¹⁹ then will you delight in right sacrifices,
   in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
   then bulls will be offered on your altar.

                                                                        ~Psalm 51

He Remembers the Barren

After weeks of hibernation-like tendencies, I'm beginning to emerge from the cloud of first trimester-symptom-dom just as the trees and flowers outside are erupting with color and growth. We--all of us Olson's--have been very thankful, despite my fatigue and never-ending nausea (a first with this pregnancy), that we--Mama and Baby--have been blessed with good health. Our first trimester still has a few weeks to go (see countdown to the right), but we thank God that He has written in His book all the days numbered for this child's life, however many they may be, as many as they are (Psalm 139:16).

On April 27, our family marked the six year anniversary of the miscarriage of our first child. I can hardly believe it's been that long. It took Papa and I years to process our child's brief life (six short weeks) and our grief, not that we understand even now all of what happened. Only God can give us that, once we see clearly with Him, and our child, in heaven. We waited for three years after we lost our child before God blessed us with P, then S, now Baby. Lately I've been thinking a lot about our first child, not least because we found out a week before the anniversary that I was only six weeks along. We had thought we were much more advanced in the pregnancy, and all of sudden I struggled with a terror I could hardly verbalize that we were going to lose this child just like we lost the first, around the same date on the calendar. I felt so ashamed of this feeling, this superstition, that I almost didn't tell Papa. But I did. And he hugged me, reminded me of all the differences between that pregnancy and this one, and that--most importantly--God holds and cares for this child, just as He holds, cares for, and keeps all of our children.

I am so thankful for the lives of our children. I know we will--well, and already have--live to see P and S suffer. We may even live to see P or S or Baby die. Yet we are glad, knowing that Jesus Christ "did once upon the cross/ suffer to redeem our loss" (LSB 457 Jesus Christ Is Risen Today:1). He died so that we, and our children, might live forever. Trusting in His mercy, in the gift of faith in their baptisms, and in the gift of faith that comes by hearing His word and receiving Him in His Holy Supper, we look forward to the endless day of eternal bliss with Christ where there are no more tears. Forever and ever, amen.

With this in mind, I want to give great thanks to Kristi L. for the link to this new blog, He Remembers the Barren. This is a much-needed resource for all women suffering with the crosses of infertility, miscarriage, and barrenness--all words we don't like to hear, all topics we don't like to encounter, all realities that many, many suffer with. Please keep all barren, infertile, and suffering women in your prayers, that they might be comforted by Christ as they traverse this broken earth.