This morning I woke up feeling like I had been in a car accident.  It happens sometimes, usually after I’ve been doing something active.  All this is new since I turned forty a few years ago.

And it’s terrible.

What’s worse is how it affects the rest of who I am.  When I experience a resurgence of pain, other things experience a resurgence as well: fear (am I just going to get worse for the rest of my life?), dread, depression, despair.  I feel myself go into the spiral cycle.  It affects my sleep, my work, my relationships with those I care about the most.

It’s just a big, fat, steaming pile of…you fill in the blank.  It is that.

I am grateful that Jesus was not above talking about the steaming piles we leave in our wake, or find ourselves stepping into.  I believe that no one was more fully integrated as spirit and soil than Jesus was.  Which means he was able to see a seed and speak of God’s good future.  He was able to connect political oppression with the realities of grace.

He was able to consider excrement and connect it with hope.

I love Jesus.

Once when he was with his students, he told them a story about excrement.  In this story, a man is frustrated because a tree he planted three years earlier hadn’t given him a single fig.  The man’s response is typical of what anyone might do when they come across slowness, inefficiency, ineptitude, or any other kind of fruitlessness: “Cut it down!”  

Fire her.  Kick him out.  Close the doors.  Walk away.  Don’t return the calls.

But in this story, the hired hand who is taking care of the fig tree stays the owner’s hand, “Leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it.”

The word for “fertilize it” here are the words in the ancient Greek, balo kopria.  Literally, “Throw excrement” at it.

Throw excrement.  According to Jesus.

I love Jesus.

Notice what he is doing here.  In a world that is increasingly impatient and looking for results now, Jesus tells a story about a tree that needs more time to grow.  And part of that growth has to do with it wading in steaming piles of excrement.  The story is a response to a group of people that were disturbed about the brokenness of their world and their lives: “Jesus, what about all this excrement?”  Jesus tells them to stay their hands and wait for the “now what”.

Which you don’t truly believe until you step in your own steaming pile.  My steaming pile has been chronic pain.  But here is what I’ve discovered: nothing creates and cultivates your soil like some good, putrid fertilizer.

As I have wrestled with my pain, I have sought healing in all sorts of ways: massage, physical therapy, surgery, prayer.  And on this journey, even though the physical pain hasn’t subsided, healing is what I have found.  I have found a deeper love and appreciation for Jesus and his willingness to carry my crap.  I have found reconciliation in my family for guilt I had been carrying around for years.  I have found growth in how I carry myself with my children.  I am even physically healthier than I’ve been in decades.

All of which grew out of a steaming pile of chronic pain, loss, and disappointment.

It doesn’t just happen.  Excrement can also lead to bitterness, rage, and resentment.  But if we are willing to allow the Ground of Our Being to do his work, and if we are willing to join in with what is required of us in that work, we may find our soil being enriched by a spirit willing to hope in the midst of the manure we find ourselves in.

To watch for the bud, the blossom.

To stay our hand and wait for it.