Commitment

Commitment always sounded like a leash to me, and this was never so clear as in my opinion of marriage. If singleness was roaming free in an open universe, marriage was being chained up to a tree in the backyard. I don’t think I would have said this out loud, because even writing it seems harsh and unfair — but I believed it, and belief is hard to dislodge. Commitment felt less like joy and more like fear. It felt big and heavy, like a boulder being shoved onto my shoulder blades and my being forced to balance it indefinitely until the end of time. Deep, lasting commitment felt suffocating and dark, like a trap. 

In college, this underlying belief came out in a small way when I tried to tend a garden. I planted some tomatoes and flowers in a community plot, and then I forgot about them. I intended to go check on everything and water my little plot a few times a week, but the summer got away from me, and my area of dirt became an overgrown, chaotic mess. The tomatoes weren’t properly set up within those round, silver cages, and so they ended up splaying out over the dirt and dying in the sun. Cleaning up my garden at the end of the summer was a long and painful process; the weeds had taken over and everything had fallen flat, gathering in one large lump of garden rot. 

A little over a year ago, I felt God recall this image to mind, and I felt him say, subtly but very clearly, that commitment was like a trellis. A garden trellis (sometimes also referred to as a cage) creates space for something to grow. Instead of allowing a plant to pile on the ground and die, the trellis creates a way upward, a space on which the plant can move toward the sun and grow into fullness. Without a trellis, my tomatoes spread out — and the flatness and lack of lifting, as well as my lack of tending, caused them to die over time. Those tomatoes had no leash and no one to answer to, but it was this lack of structure that did them in in the end. It was in the midst of this image that God reminded me how commitment works, and why I needed it. 

Rewind to 2019 when “commitment” was one of my words for the year during a season when I was contemplating quitting my job. I decided to stay in that position, but only because of a few brief words from the Lord about trust and love. Trust propelled me in my commitment to the job and the people, and love kept me at peace. I still felt, though, that I was missing something, and it has only been in the last few years that God has begun to weave something new into my understanding of commitment. I had been caught up in the hard and serious stuff of life for so long that I had forgotten the first bit of Hebrews 12:2 — “for the joy set before him he endured the cross.” It wasn’t commitment for commitment’s sake that propelled Christ — it was joy. 

I think this is partially what God was getting at with the image of the trellis. For a long time, commitment did feel like a leash to me — but over time, it has begun to feel more like a garden. Commitment requires tending and nurturing, and in this tending, beauty is born. Some of this beauty is edible and sustaining; but some of it is beautiful for the sake of beauty itself. A garden can be both functional and decadent. The wildflowers exist to bring wholeness to the ecosystem, but they also exist to bring a sense of wonder. This, I think, is the Lord’s intent for commitment. In the growing and the keeping, joy is born, and it culminates in a feast. In the book of Revelation, Christ throws a dinner-party. The wedding of the church to her groom has culminated in platters of food, some of it necessary, but much of it, as in any feast, a show of love and delight. What was grown in the garden is now harvested, prepared, and served at heaven’s table. I get married in two weeks, and as much as I have wanted to elope at times, I want the experience of my wedding to reflect this: that the joy set before our commitment is first a few seeds, which will turn into a garden, which will turn into a feast. We may not see the fruit anytime soon — but the seed will be planted; the trellis set. Over the course of decades, we will pray to see gardens, and one day, a feast.