It Is Not Well with My Soul, But I'm Trying

Some fragmented thoughts on seeds, hope, biscuits, and one blessed donkey

The 27th Day of Coronatide*
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Hey friend,

Here we are in the midst of this strange season that my friend Noah is calling Coronatide. Other than a long walk or two a day and an excursion to get provisions every two weeks or so, I’ve barely left my house in about a month. Even this shy introvert is almost ready for Coffee Hour at church again. (Almost.) I’ve been writing more letters amidst our physical distancing, so I thought I’d try to write you every now and then, to share some things I’ve been pondering. 

I preached on Sunday for the first time in a little while. (You can find the sermon here, starting at the 31st minute.) The sermon focused on Matthew’s telling of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. My Bible has a little heading atop that passage, calling it Jesus’s “Triumphal Entry.” It’s weird to me, because this parade doesn’t feel very triumphant at all. Yes, yes, I know the end of the story. But the rest of it confounds me: Jesus is riding on a donkey. We know the crowds are about to turn on him. We know he’s going to get betrayed. And we know he is going to die. The only way I can understand this entry as triumphant is to read the word differently than the world does.

One character I discussed in my sermon—and one of my favorite characters in all of the Gospels—is the donkey. The donkey often gets overlooked, because the spotlight is on Jesus and on the crowds shouting their hosannas. Sometimes the characters on the margins of the stories of Scripture have some of the most remarkable stories to tell.

My parents grew up in British-ruled Hong Kong, my mom once told me about marching as a Girl Guide in a parade for Princess Alexandra’s visit, and I still have an inexplicable soft spot for royalty. (No lecture necessary about internalized colonialism or my hypocrisy, given my convictions about equity and justice— I get it, and I own it. We contain self-contradictory multitudes, God save the Queen, and if you want to discuss the injustices done to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, I am here for every second of it.) By our standards of royal everything, Jesus should have been riding in a golden chariot or at least on a regal horse, not a lowly donkey. Yet here he comes, the broken-hearted King, sitting on a borrowed cloak, riding on someone else’s donkey. 

I think the donkey has some lessons for us, especially in a culture that seems to value the glamorous, the externally beautiful, the most outrageous. The donkey shows us that there is honor in seemingly humble work. It calls us to steadfast service. It teaches us that it matters to do well the thing(s) you’re called to do. Honestly, I find it bizarre that on Palm Sunday, we echo the crowd that shouts hosannas and waves palm fronds—the crowd turns, the shouts fade, the fronds die. Maybe we shouldn’t emulate the crowds. Maybe we should imitate the donkey. The most beautiful, faithful thing the donkey teaches us is to put our very bodies in the service of carrying the good news of God’s love and hope into the world.

Hope is a hard word for me—and for many of us—right now. I want hope to be delivered as quickly as the thing I order on Amazon Prime, and yet I’m still waiting. But this just isn’t how hope works.

I believe that hope is a daughter of faith, and faith is a gift from God. Hope isn’t empty optimism that everything will turn out all right. It’s a hard-won trust that things are happening— good things, redemptive things—that we can’t fully know or understand. It’s a fragile belief that all things will be made new. And it’s a call to action, to be a part of bringing that about for others. Those of us who have known despair can also testify that other creatures can also help us grow and hold onto our fragile hope.

Hope these days looks like going through my seed packets, thinking about when and what I’m going to plant. Two weeks ago, I started my first tray for the growing season—onions and leeks and Black-eyed Susan. One of these things is not like the others. Honestly, I felt frivolous when I bought the Black-eyed Susan seeds. I did it because I like flowers. I also did it because flowers matter, because beauty matters, and because it matters to grow things that feed other creatures. It reminds me that we’re part of a bigger ecosystem, and Black-eyed Susan, native to this land that I’m living on now, offers a bounty of pollen for butterflies and bees.

Preparing for the growing season reminded me that hope can even be found in things of death. This was easier to embrace in a season when death wasn’t constantly confronting so many of us; the metaphor feels more welcome than the reality. Seeds are harvested from the dead flowers of seasons past. And as I filled my trays with soil from a bag of seed starter, I realized that the entire bag was a bag of death. Dead parts of coconut plants. Sphagnum peat moss. Composted poultry manure. These are dead things, repurposed to help bring new life, another reminder that in God’s very good creation, life, death, and resurrection are already knit into the narrative. 

“You have been born anew into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” it says in 1 Peter 1. “Love each other deeply and earnestly. Do this because you have been given new birth—not from the type of seed that decays but from seed that doesn’t. This seed is God’s life-giving and enduring word. Thus, all human life on the earth is like grass, and all human glory is like a flower in a field. The grass dries up and its flower falls off, but the Lord’s word endures forever.” 

My Coronatide prayer for you today, amid all the shit that’s going on in the world, amid your fear and mine, amid your worry and mine, is that you’d find some seed of hope. Remember God’s love for you. Remember God’s hope in you. And remember how God has written a story of death and new life into creation itself.

What I’m Growing
When I was working at the Farminary, my friend Pearl and I wanted to grow the things that our people had grown. Our food carries stories of our heritage, our culture, our ancestors’ resilience. So Pearl, who is African American, picked a variety of collard green, and I chose bok choy. 

Nearly all the families participating in the Farminary’s CSA are white. Let me be clear: There is nothing wrong with being white. But Pearl and I noticed that, as much as they loved the tomatoes and peppers and other familiar things we grew, they did not love the bok choy or the collard greens or the produce that came from other cultures and traditions. They’d endure a week or two of these vegetables being included in their farm shares, and then we’d start hearing murmurs; some would even take out the greens they didn’t want and just leave them during pick-up time. (Later, we learned that a big part of why they didn’t learn to like these greens was a matter of preparation. They were making salads. Our people do not make salads with these things. If you don’t know what to do with an ingredient, well, God gave us Google. Let Google be your friend.)

Jerk that I can be, the following season, when I was in charge of the seed order, we ordered two extra varieties of collard and mustard green and three extra varieties of Asian greens. Let’s just say Pearl and I had a lot of greens to eat that summer, and we weren’t complaining.

I thought back to these seasons at the farm the other day, as I was planting my first bok choy. I got these seeds from Johnny’s, a Maine outfit that is owned by its employees. Seeds for some of my other Asian greens come from a family-owned operation in California called Kitazawa Seed. During World War II, the business had to be shuttered because the family, like so many other Japanese Americans, was forced into an internment camp. You can read more about the Kitazawa story here.

What I’m Cooking
Not long before we stopped traveling, we went on a biscuit binge. We were down South. We had all manner of biscuits—flaky buttermilk biscuits beautiful on their own; biscuits perfectly formed to wear a gorgeous cloak of sausage gravy; beige hockey pucks undeserving of the honorific “biscuit.” None were better than the biscuits I make. This is not to lavish praise on my middling baking skills. My people aren’t bakers; my mom didn’t even have an oven before coming to America. This is all about the recipe, which comes from Bon Appetit. These make the best, flakiest homemade biscuits I’ve ever had. It is Not Difficult. You will feel like a Professional Baker.

The recipe makes 12 biscuits. My husband and I (usually) don’t eat 12 biscuits in one sitting. I’ll bake two or four—okay, let’s be honest, six. The rest of the formed but unbaked biscuits go straight into the freezer. If you have a hankering for a biscuit one morning, just throw the frozen thing into an oven and in about half an hour, you’ve got the most perfect vehicle for honey and more butter, or jam and cream, or a bacon and egg sandwich.

You know how, on recipe sites, you have those people who are all, I love this recipe.... And I made it with none of the listed ingredients, and I did it on a wood fire instead of in a wok? I don’t want to be that person. But I do three things differently: 

1) I do this by hand, not with my food processor. I have this pretentious idea that if I do things the hard way, somehow it’s better. #Depravity

2) I freeze my butter and then I grate it, which makes it much easier to get those pea-sized pieces recipes are always talking about.  

3) The recipe calls for cutting, stacking, pressing, and then rolling the dough once, to create more layers of buttery goodness. I do it twice. Seems excessive. But excess layers are exactly the point. If you don’t press the dough down enough after the second stack, your biscuits might topple over mid-bake. Who cares? This isn’t a beauty contest.

What I’m Reading
I wish I could tell you that I have become one of those people who is using this stay-at-home time to zoom all the great classics and finally become well read. Honestly, I can barely get through the morning paper. (Yes, we still get the ink-on-newsprint paper. Support your local journalists!)

My beautiful friend Kate Bowler recently had this lovely, helpful conversation with Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times about enduring Coronatide. “We’re learning right now in isolation what interdependence feels like and what a gift it is,” she said. “The more we’re apart the more we realize how much we need each other. We’re allowed to be beautifully, stupidly needy right now."

The last book I finished was R. Eric Thomas’s Here for It. Eric writes these irreverent, laugh-out-loud commentaries on the news for Elle. His memoir is a tender, funny, at times heartbreaking exploration of belonging, race, sexuality, and faith. You can read more of his writing here. Buy the book at your local indie bookstore’s website. We freelance writers—and independent bookstores—need your backing right now.

What I’m Listening To
Since we can’t gather in body, well, thank God for modern technology and enduring creativity. Some of you have probably heard the beautiful rendition of “It Is Well with My Soul” that a Nashville virtual choir of studio singers put together. I love it. I still can’t sing this song; maybe I’ll talk more about why in a future letter. But in the meantime, here’s a gorgeous version of “Be Thou My Vision,” another of my favorite classic hymns, which my aforementioned friend Noah Livingston and his team at Ann Arbor Christian Reformed Church put together. 

One more thing: As I said, I’ve been writing more letters in this time of isolation. Emails and text messages are lovely, but there’s still nothing like an old-fashioned handwritten note that comes in the old-fashioned mail. If you or someone you know could use a word of encouragement, please email me (jeff@byjeffchu.com) their name, their address, and perhaps a line or two about their current circumstances. I’ll pop something into the mail as soon as I can.

You have my email address now. Send me your questions. I’ll try to answer some of them in future notes. 

I’m so glad we can stumble through this together. I’ll try to write more soon.

Much love,
Jeff

*I’m counting the days of Coronatide from March 10th, when my governor, Gretchen Whitmer—also known as “That Woman in Michigan,” First of Her Name, the Unbowed—declared a state of emergency. May she continue to rise up in servant leadership and speak out in righteous indignation. And for the love of God and the sake of our neighbors, may we continue to #StayHome.