Safely Into The Unknown

a devotional for winter

Welcome back to The Wildroot Parables, my friends!

Before we begin today (and this is the only time I’m going to do this, I promise) I would like to ask for a quick favor…

If you read my Advent devotional this past season, Pilgrim God, I would be so honored if you would give it a rating or review on Amazon or Goodreads!

Ratings and reviews are a phenomenal way to support indie authors, and as I work up to a self-publishing journey for both my fiction and nonfiction—including a hopeful paperback version of Pilgrim God, next year—your engagement means the world and shows other interested customers what I’m about! 

Thank you so much, and onward with the devotional!

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Photo by David Booth on Unsplash

handful of grace,
tiny seeds, dropping;

the black palm of God
in the waiting soil
below;

I fall backwards into the new year,
dropping into the dark
where I wait

shivering yet safe,

until the warmth
of spring.  

Every new year, a certain quote comes back to me. I can’t even recall the first place I read it, but I remember writing it down in my commonplace book where it returns like the tide, every January. It goes like this:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied: "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be better to you than light, and safer than a known way."

M. Louise Haskins

Despite it being one of the scariest things to believe, I do find a lot of solace in the thought that trust in God is more important—more powerful, more transformative—than certainty. That walking hand-in-hand with the Creator in the dark is more sure than a flickering, fragile lantern to light your own way. 

Nowhere do I see this more clearly, I think, than in my yearly ritual of planting my earliest seeds. 

In the crisp cold of January, I stand out in the greenhouse—where it’s only barely warmer than it is outside—and I drop seeds of onions, leeks, chard, kale, broccoli, mustard, and spinach into the dark, finished compost that I’ve stored over the winter in a big bin. I set the trays of sown seeds in the sunniest part of the greenhouse and then…I wait. For a long time. 

Planting early seeds is an exercise in patience. It’s too cold for them to germinate yet, but these cold-hardy plants manage to find every scrap of warmth they can, readying themselves to grow as soon as they’re able. Faithful in silence, patient in freeze.

When all of the other branches are still bare, these seedlings will start to grow in the cold gray of February, the lichen-green of early March. Little by little, becoming the strongest plants in the garden by April.

The dark, it turns out, is the perfect place to grow. But only when you fall back gently into God’s waiting hand. 

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