Popular Searches
“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”-Genesis 3:19
“Love and abuse cannot coexist”–bell hooks (All about love)
I shy away from the original garden. As a child I was taught to fear a punishing God who is quick to dole out retribution. As I revisit these passages now, something new is revealed.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about basic training. Basic training is the introduction to military life, and its duration and intensity varies depending on branch and mission. It’s clear to me now that going through military basic training left indelible marks on my psyche, my body, and my spirit.
I cannot speak to the other branches, but the one I was a part of was unafraid to use pain, humiliation, and fear to instruct. It tracks that these methods are part of military training because the stakes in combat situations are life and death. At the time I went through it, frequently used tools for conditioning were pushups and flutter kicks. By themselves they don’t sound like much, but if you have to do them in steel toe boots and to the point of collapse, they become ingenious tools of indoctrination. This treatment was referred to as “beatings.” Institutional changes did not allow instructors to put their hands on trainees like the military of the past, but instructors could order their trainees to move their bodies to the point of exhaustion and get a similar outcome.
I remember a day when a woman who was struggling, and who had been struggling for weeks, made a mistake. She was not learning fast enough, whatever lesson they were trying to teach her. Rather than beat her, they made her watch as the group took the beating for her. This is highly
effective because no one wants to be the reason why everyone else is in their face. When the training instructors left, some of the other women had a few choice words for her. I don’t know if she learned her lesson. I don’t remember her making a mistake that had the same consequences again. So, lesson learned?
Back to the garden and our sweat. Is this how God teaches humanity? Is this how God corrects us?
In my experience, no. I don’t know a retributive God but a God of endless grace who is unconditional love. The first time I read, “Love and abuse cannot coexist,” which is a claim the author bell hooks makes in her book, “All About Love,” it stopped me dead in my tracks and invited me to think about love, how love behaves, and my understanding of God through this lens.
I share that basic training story as an example of a time in my life where I was conditioned through pain and fear. If I’m honest, those lessons have stayed with me well beyond their usefulness in that career, which gives me the conviction that God does not get down like that.
At this season in my life, as I continue to learn and to heal, I am drawn to the dirt — the dirt as a place of healing and restoration as I learn to plant seeds, and the dirt as a place of surrender as I turn over again and again what no longer serves me in my life. What I am learning on the farm seems to come second to what I am unlearning from a life full of hard learned lessons.
This piece is part of the Farminary Lenten Reflection Series. Each week throughout the 2026 Lenten season, alumni of The Farminary Project will share a personal reflection rooted in soil, scripture, and hope. Students in the Master of Arts in Theology and Ecology program and those pursuing the Concentration in Theology, Ecology, and Faith Formation participate in the Farminary to explore ecological sustainability rooted in theological practice.
