By Emily Malloy

A rebuilding year is a phrase most often heard with regard to athletic teams. After a coach or major player leave a team, a period of time follows where expectations become more lax. The focus becomes less about immediate results in winning in the present season and more about long-term improvement. In reality, it refers to a sacrifice in the present with the expectation of future gains. Simply stated, it is a delayed gratification in hope of a future outcome. 

My life in the garden this year has been one of rebuilding. This was a realization I had when I sat down with Johnnette Williams on the EWTN program, Women of Grace, for a two-part series interview. I have been ruminating on it ever since. 

A little over a year ago, we moved out of our rental home (after moving the family 1,200 miles) and purchased our current home. I have always been fortunate to move into a home with great landscaping bones to build upon. Our current home, save some beautiful trees and a few bushes, was a blank gardening canvas. There were rock gardens instead of foundational planting around the whole house. I mean it when I say that the canvas was plumb blank. Oh, and the soil! The topic of healing the soil could be an article unto itself. This is much more than a rebuilding year, more like a rebuilding decade.

Our dreams of establishing a farm meant planning and planting a garden would have to be cost-effective (read: slow and cheap). And slow it has been. 

I was fortunate to bring some of the mature flowers that I had planted and established for Theology of Home IV: Arranging the Seasons, but for all intents and purposes, I was really starting from scratch. What it also meant was that every bit of fruit of my labor (or, as in this case: flower), was to be "sacrificed" in a sense, to bear more fruit (or many flowers) for years to come. I have let each bloom and go to seed to gather more seeds in order to plant an increased amount in the future. 

The reality of this is that I seldom have fresh cut flowers in my house. I have written a whole book on how much this changes one's disposition and the home itself! It is something of immense value to me. But what I have come to realize in this rebuilding year is that even in beauty, a greater beauty can be cultivated through a delayed benefit.

That is the foundation of life in the garden. The gardener plants the seed, looks, watches, waits, and then, finally, enjoys. However, in my case this year, I have been enjoying beauty from afar. This is because within each flower --when permitted to dry -- is an almost endless amount of seeds to be harvested, collected, protected, and planted to bear even more fruit the following year. For the florist within me, it is often excruciating to not cut flowers and bring them into the home, to let them wither and dry on the stem. However, it is what is best long term to bear even greater fruit, so the gardener within resigns to wait.

Ah, but is this not the case for so much in life? Investment and prudence and cultivation of patience? Delayed gratification and sacrifice for something greater down the line? While also abstaining from a particular good in the wait? Yes. Rebuilding years are not just for life in the garden or athletics.

We have all types of rebuilding years: in careers in businesses, in our marriages, parenting, and other relationships, in our spiritual life. But these times require fortitude and patience, and also a recollected posture in the present for that is the space where real growth takes place. It is easy to be hopeful while in imminent anticipation, but sometimes all of the forward-looking prevents the virtue to be developed in the present. 

One of the greatest fruits of being comfortable in the work and wait of the rebuilding year is that of detachment. We grow when we decouple ourselves from obsessions over outcomes. Detachment permits the denial of the insatiable beast of instant gratification in exchange for joy in the present wait. It takes a lot of effort to maintain control, particularly when in expectation, so we let go and we let God do his work. 

So we work in love. We rebuild, toil, and wait, knowing that we, too, improve in the process. Thanks be to God.