Room to Breathe

A while back, I’m not sure how much of a while back, whether it was before or after Helene, but a while back my husband came home from the grocery store with food and milk and something else: a plant.

It was a small plant in a small plastic pot. I set it in the window where it sat over the winter, surviving frigid blasts through our poorly insulated windows and stretches of drought from my own negligence. It sat and it grew, a little, but not much.

Last month I decided to move it outside. I pulled out a large, clay pot that already had old soil in it and plunked the plant down in the crumbly dirt. Within a couple of weeks it had grown three times in size. I was stunned. Not that it grew, but that it grew so much.

Who knew that a little plastic pot could be so limiting?

Maybe I did.

I know what it’s like to be in an environment, a system, that supports me and holds me up but also holds me back and doesn’t allow me to grow.

Some people like rigid rules and structure that tells them what to do and when to do it, what to believe and just when your belief has slid off the edge into unacceptable (if not heresy). They like a world filled with black and white, yes and no, good and bad. Where there is a right and there is a wrong and it is up to you to tow the right line. It is a life of calculus, an engineer’s dream. Fit inside the formula and it works. Get one digit off and the whole house of cards comes down.

But while bridges and skyscrapers and rockets to the moon rely on precision in both calculation and application, plants are different. And people are different. Well, at least, I’m different.

Throw a formula at me and I panic. Expect precision, perfection, and performance out of me and I crumble. Stifle me with a strident set of “shoulds” and I wither and die.

A few years ago, after decades within the conservative evangelical church, I articulated this: that I think I might actually do better somewhere with looser rules and expectations and beliefs, where I am free to add the structure I need to my relationship with God without the suffocating blanket of somebody else’s definition of “right” and without the expectation that I can and should have all the answers.

For the past two years I have been in that place of freedom. I got here the hard way but perhaps, for me, the only way. I got here through pain. Then again, not many of us leave faith communities for the sheer fun of it.

But it has been good. So good. God is no longer The Great ‘You Must’ in the sky. He’s bigger and wider and broader and totally capable of handling me with all my questions and pathologies and doubts and insecurities and quirky ideas and maybe even turn all those things into something good, something useful, maybe even something beautiful.

I finally have the space to grow at my own pace and into my own person.

I have room to breathe.

Here's hoping that my growth can be as fruitful as that of my little plant who just needed a bigger pot to thrive.