The Long Game

A couple of months ago, our family planted the first garden we’ve grown in a while. It’s a little hobby garden - nothing like my mom and stepdad’s half-acre in Minnesota that each summer produces gallons of canned tomatoes (and ketchup, spaghetti sauce, and salsa…).

In the waning days of June, I’m enjoying watching things come up, and the find soothing the rhythms of thinning, weeding, and watering.

At other times, I have grown gardens and by mid-August, I was, well, kind of over it.  I would myself wondering if the yield was really worth the reward and maybe skip watering for a day, and then another, and then before you know it, instead of a garden I had a bed of brown sticks.

This year, I’m looking ahead to that moment of “over it” and planning for it, so that I can keep the garden moving, even when the urgency of spring has passed. Although it doesn't come naturally to me, I’m working on playing the long game, or at least the “until end of summer” game.  

In recent weeks, as we watched in horror as the Supreme Court rolled back rights for women, trampled on the right to privacy, terrorized the planet, and loosened gun control laws, I have heard progressives, again and again, say that they “don't recognize this country” or they “can’t believe this is happening.”

The thing is, though, that the far-right has been preparing for this time since at least the early 1970’s - using their influence to create as conservative a federal judiciary as possible, so that, as Mitch McConnell has said, they can have as much influence as they can for as long as they can.

While we have given up watering and moved on to other things, the enemies of compassion and justice have been playing the long game. 

You may have also heard people say in recent days that “things are going to get worse before they get better.” That may be true, but as people of faith, we have a long game too.

We know that change may not come overnight, but we believe what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr told us, that though the moral arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice. We know that the actions worth taking, that will lead not only to the survival but to the thriving of our community, our nation, and our planet, take time.

We know that we cannot afford, as I have before with the vegetable garden, to run out of steam and drop out. 

Now is the time to lean even more energetically into loving our young, supporting our elders, engaging our neighbors, deepening our spiritual practices, standing up as visible allies for our trans siblings, feeding the hungry, marching forth when we are called, writing letters and postcards when we can, raising our voices in song and shouts for racial equity, spending our financial resources in ways that heal, building roofs over the heads of the unhoused and entering into the grinding work of freeing prisoners wherever they would be.

We need to keep watering our tomatoes, even when the dry days of August arrive. None of these things make change happen all at once. All of them take patience and steadfastness and showing up again and again and again. Weary as we are from pandemic and division, with the encouragement of the Divine and this community of faith, we have the opportunity and the responsibility in these troubled days to play our own long game.