Husbandry: the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops.

As usual, my perspective of God is changing.

Early on in my life, I thought I had free license to sin, so I would. Then I would feel guilt and shame so I’d ask for forgiveness, and then continue in my sinfulness with no thoughts of real repentance.

Later down the line, I started to perform in my relationship with God for 10 years. (I’m still unlearning this). I white-knuckle obeyed since I knew that God wanted me to obey him through his word and that He wanted me to be done with sin–so I did all the Christian behaviors…but had a fractured soul and an unhealed heart. Constant anxiety, toxic guilt, and suffocating shame characterized my walk with Christ.

Now, upon this new unfurling leaf, the word that I use almost daily (thanks to my highschool students) is messy. God has healed much of my past trauma and I am learning to allow Him to love me as I am. And that’s what I am–messy—but not messy like the Cookie Monster or Oscar the Grouch. Messy like an overgrown, wild garden in need of tending and cultivation.

And I’m learning God as this patient, loving, strong, loyal Father with a green thumb performing his husbandry work inside of me.

Husbandry: the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops.

The first time I came across the word “husbandry” I was getting my MFA in Creative Writing. If I remember correctly, I had not before heard the word used in such a way as I had when I read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 13:

O! that you were your self; but, love, you are
No longer yours, than you your self here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again, after yourself’s decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold,
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
   O! none but unthrifts. Dear my love, you know,
   You had a father: let your son say so.

This meaning, having to do with careful tending and scrupulous management, illuminates new significance for me of Isaiah 62:4 and Isaiah 54:5-8.

“Never again will you be called “The Forsaken City”

or “The Desolate Land.”

Your new name will be “The City of God’s Delight”

and “The Bride of God.”

for the Lord delights in you

and will claim you as his bride”

Isaiah 62:4

“For the Lord has called you back from your grief–

as though you were a young wife abandoned by her husband.”

Isaiah 54:6

In the first verse, God uses the imagery of marriage to make the point of God being Israel’s husband and bridegroom. With the understanding that the original meanings of the word “husband” are

• the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals
• management and conservation of resources

these definitions set in my mind’s eye difficult yet purposeful work; a work meant to bring about life and abundance to an otherwise messy, overgrown, and wild environment. This particular image of God is restoratively healing for me because when I try to envision God as husband, I start to feel like I must conjure up these romantic feelings about God. However, that doesn’t work for me.

But this picture of God caring for, cultivating, and lovingly managing Israel, and by extension, me…that I can work with and learn to submit to.

One of my deepest desires, as a woman, is to be managed (cared for) loving, diligently, and carefully. It is the type of love I try to extend to my students; it is the type of love I desire for myself. Israel sinned constantly and consitently turned their backs on the one who loved them most. And yet, he kept his hand on the thorns or their rosebuds, hoping to unfurl their beauty in the midst of their rebellion.

So friend, all I am saying is, I’m learning to sit in the tumbleweed mess that is me and slowly entrust the thorny tangles to the gardener with beautifully calloused hands.

Join me?

Love and Light,

Kourtney Naomi