Gone to Seed

I’ve planted a lot of seeds in my garden. Some of them are large, some are small. Each is unique to the plant that it will eventually produce. Usually, you can learn something about someone or something by learning about where it comes from. I’m not so sure that this is true about seeds, though. The size, shape, and nature of a seed often don’t tell you very much about the plant that will grow from it. For example, sage seeds are large and round, like tiny marbles, but sage plants are woody, like shrubs, and their leaves are textured like soft scales. If you were to try to learn something about a sage plant from its seed, you might conclude that a sage plant would be black, smooth, and maybe even round. The seed doesn’t even tell you anything about the flowers a sage plant produces. Those are delicately blue and purple with cone-like leaves. Carrot seeds are also very strange. They are tiny, brown, and spiky. They blow away easily in the wind and are tremendously tedious to plant. (As an aside, everything about carrots is tedious except the actual growing of them. They’re tedious to plant, tedious to clean, tedious to peel, and tedious to chop.) But carrots, as you know, are orange and grow underground with their riot of green leaves sticking out of the dirt. They are roots and they can get very large, if left to their own devices. They’re only brown if they are sick and not spiky at all. You can’t tell much about a carrot, just by looking at its seeds.

Have you ever heard the idiom, “Going to seed”? If you’ve not spent much time around a garden, you may have heard it, but not really known what it means. When I hear this phrase, I think of an old man, living out his days in sloth when he could still be contributing to the community, though he is past his working prime. Or I think of an abandoned house overgrown with Virginia Creeper and bushes taking over the front walk. Everything rusted, paint chipping, and windows broken. The gist of the phrase is something gone to waste. It comes from a time when people lived closer to and more dependent upon the earth. When you depend on the earth for your livelihood, you make sure not only that you grow good produce, but also that you save some seeds for next year’s crops. Some seeds, you can get from inside a fruit or vegetable. Tomatoes, squash, and apples are all examples of plants whose seeds are inside their fruit. In contrast, have you ever seen a spinach seed in the leaves that you buy at the grocery store? What about those carrot seeds I described earlier? Are their seeds in the root? Don’t go digging through your fridge. You won’t find carrot seeds in the roots and you won’t find spinach seeds in your salad blend. Some plants, in order to reproduce, have to go to seed.

And that’s where the phrase comes from. After you have harvested most of your crop or gotten most of what you can from a plant, you leave some, unharvested, so that it can “go to seed”. Broccoli has these beautiful yellow flowers when it’s going to seed. Did you know that all the tiny green bulbs on a broccoli crown are actually unbloomed flowers? If you let it, after the crowns are harvested, broccoli plants will start to bolt, usually due to heat, and put up longer, skinnier arms with yellow flowers that eventually, if left alone, produce long pea-like pods full of broccoli seeds. But this doesn’t happen if you don’t leave the plant in the ground long after it’s stopped yielding fruit.

How and/or why the phrase “going to seed” started to connote something wasted or unused, I don’t know. Language does some traceable, but unpredictable things, especially as culture changes. This phrase, being agricultural, would start to lose its original meaning as English-speaking, western cultures moved away from an agricultural society in favor of a more industrial-technological hell-scape (just in case you were wondering which kind of society I think is better). Now that we understand what “going to seed” means in actual, literal, agricultural terms, I’d like to apply that knowledge to its current connotation and my own life to see what we can learn.

I’ve been thinking a lot about waste recently. If you’ve been around here, you’ll notice that I haven’t posted since April. I’ve been pretty depressed and processing some deep loss in my life. There have been a lot of lies swimming around in my mind about wasting my time, wasting my life. Most of this comes from the fact that I don’t feel like I have a lot to show, empirically, for how I have spent the past decade. Sure, there have been some successes, some good things to show for all my labor. But when I line up all the time, work, energy, and effort that I’ve put in against the outcomes, it feels like a waste. It doesn’t help that my former boss told me that I and my job were a waste of resources because of my failure to build the kind of momentum that, I guess, he was really looking for. 

And, as a result, I’ve been sent away. Not fired, technically, but eliminated because I’m too good at what I do to stay in a position where I’m not gaining any ground. I’m too good to stay in the place where I’ve labored hard for the good of people that few would consider worthwhile. My skills should be put to better use and I’d certainly, easily find another job that let me use them, if I’d only go looking. That’s what I was told. 

I won’t be allowed to lavish all that I have to offer on a place that rarely sees a return. Nevermind that God himself lavishes all that he is on us while we are still his enemies. Nevermind that creation is nothing if not extreme lavishness and excess to the point of absurdity in an effort to communicate the great love of the Maker for the things made. Nevermind all that. I’m a waste. My time is a waste. The resources that it takes to do what I do are a waste.

And because others spoke that over me, that’s what I tell myself when I can’t sleep at night. That is, if I’m not crying because I won’t get to sit across from young people and hear their stories and speak life into them anymore. Not for a while, at least. I tell myself these lies because I’ve always believed them. I won’t tell you the entirety of my experience right now, but I’ve been rejected time and time again for not fitting into one mold or set of expectations or another. I’m my own person, for better or for worse and I can’t sleep at night faking it. Well, given my current experience, I can’t sleep at night at all. I’d rather lose sleep because I was consistent, generous, and honest and people cast me out for it than because I’m some good-for-nothing charlatan. 

All of this and much, much more makes me feel like I’m going to seed. If I’m honest, I’ve felt like this for most of my life. I feel like that old man in my mind, sitting on a porch, yelling at everyone to get off of his grass rather than finding some way to encourage the vagrant youth he hollers at. I feel like the past ten years have been wasted time, wasted potential, and wasted resources. And, from the outside, empirically speaking, they have been. But that’s not the whole story. If we begin to apply the agricultural meaning of “going to seed”, then we start to get a different picture. I seriously doubt that it was ever a waste to sit across from another person and tell them that they were loved. I seriously doubt that it was a waste to spend my time and energy thinking about how to build a more welcoming and inclusive community for outcast students. I seriously doubt that it was a waste to pay attention to the culture on campus so that I could not only figure out how to meet students, but also build engaging programs and Bible studies to meet their needs. Sure, hundreds of people didn’t respond, but the ones who did got to experience love and belonging like they wouldn’t anywhere else. At least, that was my goal. 

And what if the “waste” of the past ten years was just “going to seed”? What if I poured out my very self so that those students could have something to plant in the years to come? What if the love, concern, time, money, energy, and space are all just seeds given away for crops of glory in the coming years? What if I’ve gone to seed in the truest way possible and there’s nothing left to do, but uproot the old, dead plant and turn the beds over for the next season?

Now, just because I’m fighting for hope here DOES NOT and WILL NOT EVER excuse the horrible treatment I endured from my superiors over the past ten years. The lies, abuse, mistreatment, and discrimination have marked me for life. I will work to forgive, but those things will NEVER be okay, just because God is able to work all things together for my good. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that, just because God used it for good, that you should just get over abuses of power. EVER. God sees. God knows. And he will handle it in time.

So, for the next little bit here, I’m going to write about the losses and the hopes I have for the future. I have no idea where I’m going or when we’ll get there, but I’d love to have you along as I think about, process, and heal from the damage that I suffered over the past ten years. I’ve written about some of it already, but I’m going to make a conscious effort to write more explicitly and in real time as I’m healing. Why? Because I believe that there are so many people who have been abused by Christians and the Church and I’m sick and tired of it. You have been misled and mishandled. You weren’t loved and it caused you a crisis of identity and faith. I want to document some of my own experience so that you can know that, even if people are capable of being the worst, Jesus is always the best. Not only that, but he’s deeply wounded by how you’ve been treated and he doesn’t want you to walk away from him. I don’t either.