Working with hope in a crisis

It's been awhile since I've written - nothing has seemed adequate compared to the enormity of what's been happening this year. In the Bay Area, we've seen some of the worst fires ever. Friends have evacuated their homes, and have lost lives and loved ones to Covid-19. Jobs, and the security they entail, have dwindled. We're reckoning with racial injustice and our own blindness to it. Isolation is pervasive. Whether or not we're directly affected, suffering has come degrees closer to all of us.

What does hope look like in the midst of this? I had a tiny glimpse this past week while doing something unusual (for me) - gardening. I've never had the patience for it, but working from home for 8 months without my typical travel schedule allowed some routines that I haven't had in all my adult life.

As I planted seedlings and watered them daily since late Spring, my patience was severely tested. First, they took a really long time to bear the first fruit. Then, after fruit appeared, they took (what felt like) a very long time to ripen. For tomatoes, for a long time they looked like nothing was happening - they were green for weeks at full size - to the point where we wondered if they would never turn red. Then all of a sudden, within a few days there's a change and they're totally red. Similar to cucumbers - once the fruit appears (after months...), they grow rapidly, going from an inch to twelve inches in a few days. Before that there were no outward signs of fruit.

As my children happily picked fruit this past week, I was reminded that sometimes it feels like nothing is changing as you daily go about the small things. Then all of a sudden things change really fast and when you actually glimpse (or sometimes hold) what you were working towards there's some marvel and gratefulness at the process, in addition to the product.

Whatever service each of us is doing in this time, we might not see the outcomes we want right now. Or, the more we see and understand, the more it feels like anything we do is so minuscule compared to the enormity of the problems and uncertainty. Our call right now is to keep pushing on in the the daily grind with hope, whether we're tending to patients, developing a vaccine, steering your country or company through hard times, fixing a bug, pursuing racial justice, designing a feature to protect users or improve their experience, helping fight the fires, coordinating relief, creating jobs, supporting grieving community members etc.

So much of change goes unseen until it crests. And it will. Just like those tomatoes, our children will likely enjoy the benefits of our work ;)

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.

Do justly now.

Love mercy, now.

Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it"

(Talmudic Text, interpretive translation via gratefulness.org)