Consider the humble bee

The ground demands patience and will yield no other way. Pull a carrot too fast, and it snaps off in your hand. Try sowing green beans before the ground temperature is above 60 F, and they will refuse to germinate. Slow and steady wins the day. The garden, like more of life than I care to admit, demands sowing, feeding, weeding, and cultivation all in turn.

We live in a not-slow and not-steady culture. A culture of instant access that comes to us without leaving our chairs. We can glory in how technology both expands and contracts our worlds—being able to livestream an event we’d never be able to attend in person or talk to and see a loved one who lives half a world away.

But the downside of a push-notification world is a culture that’s perpetually on, always rushing at us. Admit it: You lose whole hours reading email and scrolling imagery of often perfect-looking lives, escaping the God-given work at hand.

Time magazine made a recent cover story of “Why we’re losing the Internet to the culture of hate.” Turns out the ninth-most-visited website in the United States is the unshackled Reddit, and it’s largest discussion group, with 150,000 subscribers, is “fatpeoplehate.”

The work they are doing, collecting pollen ... is steady and can’t be rushed.

Trolling, or directly insulting or threatening online users, no longer hides in the web’s dark corners. It’s the kind of front-and-center conversation American culture is having with itself all day long. “Trolls don’t hate people as much as they love the game of hating people,” writes Joel Stein.

Moving against the haters’ current isn’t only a matter of choice; it’s a matter of habit. Not every observable fact deserves my snap judgment, but I need new daily habits to find a better way—what Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith calls “cultural liturgies.”

It’s been my annual task to reflect on what the garden is teaching me. This year it is the patient unfolding of its season, and the steady work that goes on in my absence, or almost invisibly beneath my nose. It stands in contrast to the harsh season of full-frontal mudslinging we find ourselves in, and calls me to tasks and disciplines that cultivate steady Christ-centeredness and fervent enjoyment of this world God has made.

Take bees. In my haste I view them as a garden menace, darting at my head or hiding near a tomato vine, making my skin tingle at just the thought of a sting. They sound angry. But try watching a bee sometime, just following it around the garden bed. Bees actually float. They seem to pause and explore, drinking deeply from one flower head while pausing, hovering, over another.

The work they are doing, collecting pollen from the male part of a flower or flowering crop and moving it to the female part, is steady and can’t be rushed. Most actively work only about eight weeks of the year, but consider: Ninety percent of all food crops depend on insect pollinators. And the work of pollination contributes about $25 billion to the U.S. economy in farm income.

What do the patient, painstaking habits of bees look like in the life of an ordinary part-time gardener like me? Perhaps instead of darting from one activity to another, overspent and undernourished for the tasks of life, surfing a virtual universe and grazing upon a superficial world, I should plow into a long-term project with real-world benefits. I can start with reading a book, every day, investing in neighbors and newcomers, every week.

The work of pollination is not only patient but also sublimely creative. God could grow plants without bees carrying goop from one petal to another, but instead created a system of dependency between plant and animal, sun and soil. Cultivating the lost virtue of patience (plus all the others) actually helps us see, and create, beauty.

And then there’s hope. The bee’s work is pointing to a harvest. “The plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing the crop,” writes the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 9). Harvests come in due season, bees rest, and that’s enough reason for anyone to plow into the ground they are given.

Email mbelz@wng.org