Embrace the Manure

You can curse the mess, or you can grab a shovel.

We are connoisseurs of the clean slate. If something in our lives smells like failure, we bag it up and drag it to the curb. Who wants yesterday’s mess lingering around?

But growth rarely begins with a clean sweep. More often, it begins with what we’d rather not claim.

The pastor and scholar Eugene Peterson reminded people that God’s deepest work is almost always slow and hidden. “When it comes to doing something about what is wrong in the world,” he wrote, “Jesus is best known for his fondness for the tiny, the invisible, the quiet, the slow: yeast, salt, seeds. And manure.”

Manure, Peterson pointed out, is neither dramatic nor glamorous. You won’t see change tomorrow. Nobody throws a party when it arrives. And yet this apparently dead and despised waste is teeming with the things needed for life. He called it “the stuff of resurrection.”

Of course, calling something “the stuff of resurrection” doesn’t make it smell any better while you’re standing in it. Suffering is real. Grief deserves its full weight.

But the people we admire most aren’t those who glided through life unscathed. They’re the ones who faced hardship and grew kinder and stronger because of it.

Suffering can break us, yes. But it can also break us open — which is, after all, exactly what soil needs before anything new can take root.