When Hope for the Future Becomes a Secret Garden

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Overgrown. Choked with weeds. Brittle and brown. Mostly dead. That was the secret garden Mary Lennox discovered, and I find my hope for the future often bears a gloomy resemblance. But under all its decay, that garden was wick–that’s Yorkshire for “alive”. And in that, too, my hope for the future runs parallel.

Reading has been a passion since I first soared with it in first grade, so how The Secret Garden escaped me, I don’t know. But since my musings for this post revolved loosely around its plot, I thought I should better acquaint myself with it. In its original form, not the film or Broadway musical adaptations that were my only exposure. So I read it for the first time this week–well, listened to it; you can listen while you work better than you can read–and concluded it must join the titles on my overcrowded bookcase. No doubt hearing it read in authentic Yorkshire contributed much to its charm, but even in plain American, the story is no less priceless and timeless.

And, as I’d hoped, it lent new perspective to my own secret garden of hope and faith, which has seemed to die a little at a time the last several years as I’ve watched it over the wall and wished I knew where the door was, let alone the key, that would allow me inside to tend it.

Hope for the Future When You’re Archibald

Archibald Craven’s hope for the future died with his wife, so he locked up her garden, and with it, his heart.

“He was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. He had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through.”

Sometimes, out of bitterness, sorrow, self-preservation, maybe all three, we’re the ones who lock the garden and bury the key.

I’ve done it. I’ve been an Archibald. And maybe that’s called for sometimes. When the pain is too acute to keep the doors open. When you have to bury hopes and memories where they won’t constantly remind you they’re still only hopes and memories. Retreat to lick your wounds. Rest. Heal.

But that’s the operative word. Heal. Not wallow. There’s room in life to be a hurting Archibald who’s just working through the grief. Wallowing Archibalds, as the story plainly shows, only compound the tragedy.

Dark, heart-broken thinking can be morbidly satisfying. And easily justified by circumstances.

But how much healthier satisfaction would we find in the “deep blue gentians blooming all about”, the silver linings, the things we can still thank God for, if we didn’t obstinately refuse to see them?

They might not banish all the sorrow. But perhaps they’d remind us sorrow isn’t all that’s left.

Hope for the Future When You’re Colin

Releasing your grip on a collection of brooding thoughts is not always easy. Maybe never easy. Especially when you’re a wallowing Colin, who didn’t lock the garden but still has to reap the consequences.

“So long as Colin shut himself up in his room and thought only of his fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and reflected hourly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring and also did not know that he could get well and could stand upon his feet if he tried to do it.”

Colin never would have had to learn he could get well if he hadn’t been told his whole life that he wasn’t. He shut himself up because his father shut him up, and out, first.

Archibald chose to wallow.

Colin was trained to wallow.

Archibald’s hope died, so he locked the garden.

Colin’s hope died because his father locked the garden. Because locking the garden locked everything else.

Not to call God an Archibald–any garden he seems to lock is locked with purpose, not heart-broken thinking–but I relate to Colin’s plight. No, I haven’t had a houseful of doctors and housekeepers and servants telling me these many years that I have no future. But do the voices in my head count? The suggestions of my circumstances and, no doubt, the devil?

Would there be room for those suggestions to take hold if God didn’t seem to have my hope for the future under lock and key?

Purpose or not, the fact remains that I have felt locked out. And like I’ve had no choice but to watch a garden die that I so wanted to keep alive.

The Hope for the Future I Grew

I taught kindergarten for eight years. It was a trove of invaluable experience. Everything I learned about training a class of five-year-olds, I believed, was preparing me to train up my own children, and when the time came to move on, that experience felt very much like a much-loved garden. I’d grown faith, testimony, a deeper understanding of God’s character. A little humility, I hope. A deeper understanding of myself. A willingness to fix me before I tried to fix them. Weeds had been pulled and new seeds planted and watered.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was coming along.

I hoped the reason it seemed time to step out of that role was because it was time to share all that with the rest of the people for whom I’d cultivated it. I’d done my best to practice it on my students. Time to practice it on my children.

This May, I will have not been a kindergarten teacher as long as I was one.

There are still no children of my own to share that garden with.

Instead of inviting in the people I thought I grew it for, God seems to have ushered me out and locked the door.

And everything I so painstakingly cultivated looks “quite dead”, as Mary feared her secret garden was.

It’s been hard to watch.

But maybe I’ve spent so much time wishing I could find the door the ivy’s now grown over, wishing I knew where the key was, wishing I could go in and bring it back to life, that I haven’t noticed what God brought me in to when he closed that door. Or appreciated what’s been happening there.

The Hope for the Future I’m Growing

They say God never closes a door without opening a window. Watching eight years of your life pass by with seemingly nothing to show for it does not feel like an open window. Especially when those eight years appear to have killed everything you had to show for the eight years before that.

Sometimes when God closes a door, it feels like a dungeon door. With you on the wrong side of it.

But maybe that saying needs to be rephrased. God never closes a door without providing a window.

It’s not always obvious where it is at first, and finding and opening it takes seeking and asking and knocking that God can’t do for you. But accumulate some hindsight, and you might realize you’ve been looking at it all along. That the struggle in this new place to find peace and purpose has slowly cleared the overgrowth not just from one window but several, perhaps allowing even more light and fresh air into where you are than you had where you were.

It feels like God pulled an Archibald on me. Locked me out of my garden and brought all my hope for the future to a screeching halt.

But here’s what I think really happened.

He didn’t banish me from the garden. He just brought me to another part of it. A place that also needed attention, where I could get other experience I lacked. Where I am is an extension of where I was. What I know now has added to what I knew then. There’s been no loss or starting over. Just continuing. These last eight years have been steps forward, not backward.

If for no other reason, I know that because as much as I grew in my kindergarten teacher’s garden, I didn’t know there like I know here, in whatever garden you call the one I’m in, that God is my friend.

Hard experience forges bonds with those you share the bumpy road with. God and I have done some serious bonding. Not without some serious fighting, at least on my part. But maybe that’s made the bond that much stronger.

In a life that’s felt like a long hallway of closed doors, I call that a very large and wide-open window.

A Secret Garden That is Wick

As for that locked door, that buried key–maybe they’re not as locked and buried as I’ve thought, but even if they are, if that part of my experience had to sit on the shelf and gather some dust while I worked on this one, I think I’ll find when God opens the door again that it’s not as lost as I feared. For two reasons.

One, I don’t believe I only planted showy annuals that last one season. I think it’s full of daffodils and tulips, hyacinths, lilies, and crocuses. Hardy flowers from hardy bulbs that return year after year with nothing to coax them but warm sunshine.

These flowers, I know from experience, will survive almost any degree of neglect. Not only survive but multiply. In Martha’s words, “They’re things as helps themselves. If you don’t trouble ’em, most of em’ll work away underground for a lifetime an’ spread out an’ have little ‘uns.”

Much of my experience may be waiting for the warmth of spring to bloom. But it hasn’t waited idly. It’s been working away underground so when spring does come, it won’t only call to life the few bulbs I planted. It will bring hundreds more.

Second, I think God has been my Ben Weatherstaff. The gardener who checked on things despite the locked door, climbing the wall once or twice a year to prune and dig about the roots.

The reason the garden was as wick as it was when Mary found it.

Just because I can’t get into the garden doesn’t mean no one can. God loves what I grew there as much as I do. He’s watching over it.

“There’s Green in That Wood Yet”

Maybe my roses are running as wild as those in Mary’s secret garden. But Ben told her “they was in rich soil, so some of ’em lived.”

I think God provided some rich soil to plant mine in.

Dickon told her, “They’ve run wild, but ‘th strongest ones has fair thrived on it.” That they’d “growed an’ growed, an’ spread an’ spread, till they’s a wonder.”

I hope mine have thrived in the adversity. Discovered just how strong they are for having their roots tested.

For whatever reason, God closes some doors. At what feels like a total loss to us.

But see the windows that opened because of it. And know that what seems lost rarely is. “It isn’t a quite dead garden.” It’s a garden with a promising future.

Cut it back a little and you’ll say as Dickon said, and probably as God has been trying to assure you all along, “There’s green in that wood yet.”

If parts of you or your hope seem dead, I hope something here has given them new life. Or helped you see the life already in them. Share a comment about your own secret garden and, as always, share this post. Thanks for reading!

*Side Note: The two flower pictures in this post were taken on my trip to England. A genuine English garden and some heather growing on the roadside. Seemed appropriate. 😊

If this resonates with you, these might, too:

A Response to Adversity That Won’t Invite More

When You Think Your Hope Is as Dead as Lazarus

What Hope Looks Like When It’s All You’ve Got

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