The smallness is the soil

The greatness is the ground (Part II)

France, L’Arche, 2004. Stripping beds of urine-soaked sheets, foul-stenched and dripping. Washing them in the dank dark cave of the basement, spiders running along laundry lines stretched across ancient wooden beams. Ironing fitted sheets in the living room—who irons? who irons sheets? who irons fitted sheets?—only to find them drenched again next morning. Tossing aside every glossy picture of a year of service, what it means to care for disabled adults, day after day after day. Picking up the hamper of humility, not knowing it is preparation for every calling that comes next. 

Soil can get your hands dirty. 

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Minnesota, 2011. Jostling a toddler in my lap, nursing a newborn. Learning to make lunch with one hand free, learning to juggle two, learning to let go of every expectation. Marking small victories: folding laundry, cooking dinner, texting back, finishing work. Collapsing into bed each evening, knowing dawn will come too soon, knowing they will need me in the night. Feeling pulled in every direction but realizing this stretch is the tension of muscles gaining strength.

Soil brings growth.

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France, 2022. Stopping at Lisieux on pilgrimage, already rolling my eyes, ready for the next stop. Bristling at Térèse’s little way, preferring Joan’s spunk and sword, refusing to shrink further in a church that already wants me small. Stepping inside the museum, stopping at the saint’s papers and photos. Realizing she was a writer, realizing she loved Joan, realizing she was fierce and found an upside-down way. Heaving aside yet another heap of assumptions. Scuffing shoe toes in the convent courtyard, dragging in the dirt, humbled to be wrong. 

Soil is easy to overlook.

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Minnesota, 2024. He turns over in bed and touches my arm. You have to hear this, he says. A teaspoon of soil can hold hundreds of kilometers of mycelium. I squint my eyes, furrow my brow. A teaspoon? Kilometers? That’s impossible. Miles and miles of thread-like filaments stretching underneath us, a complex communication network beyond anything known to generations past. For the millionth time, marveling at how on earth could any of this have come from less than God, imagining intricacies of micro- and macro-scope reaching out like infinite fingers of creation.

Soil is alive.

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Sounds clichéd to say that smallness is greatness, that everything we overlook beneath matters more than the lofty heights. Doesn’t this keep a firm thumb on the least-of-these, shoving down the ones struggling to make it on the margins? Be happy where you are. Stay quiet, docile, serene. Bloom where you’re planted. 

Yet the stubborn pebble-in-the-shoe truth: what is great comes from what is small. Our smallness is the soil of our own flourishing, the earth from which we bear fruit. Not from the ego’s lunging and lusting, but from the heart’s breaking do we grow.

But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.

To bear fruit, we must yield. To sow seeds, we must scatter. And if we have any dusty hope of scrabbling together a life that serves others, creates beauty, speaks truth, eases pain, builds hope, or nurtures freedom, we will learn the truth that only comes from bending low and getting our hands dirty in the ground where we stand.

Soil is where we start and where we end, dust to dust. But this dark, fertile paradox beneath our feet—clay and rock, water and air, mineral and vegetable and animal, living and dying—also supports every step we take on this spinning planet. Gritty as grain or soft as silt, yet strong enough to hold us. Everything we have built rests on the sacred ground beneath our feet. Can we rediscover this truth in time?