I’ve spent a lot of time in the early months of this year pruning rosebushes.

Up until, oh, sometime in mid-January, I had never done anything to tend a flower garden. Never shaped a bush, never mulched or fertilized, never even watered an outdoor plant that would not reward me with food.

Not once.

(It isn’t that I’ve been opposed to such things, per se. But I grew up in the high desert and my tastes have tended toward the practical over the aesthetic. Time is always at a premium. And, perhaps most importantly, I have long thought that I have a bit of a brown thumb.)

But this new-to-us property, well, it has a multitude of rosebushes, planted here and there and everywhere, and every last one of them was in need of some careful attention with a sharp pair of pruners. So, I texted a dear friend who is a master gardener and asked if she would come over one afternoon and show me what to do.

We spent a few hours together, working on the two bushes right outside my front door. She taught me the basics, enough to be dangerous. And then she went home and left me to it.

Despite her most excellent instruction, I have no illusions that I actually know how to properly care for roses. But still, I did what I could.

It needed doing, and there was no one else to do it but me.

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Sometime in the last month or so, I added Matt Whitman’s Ten Minute Bible Hour to my podcast lineup. I started at the very beginning (a very good place to start), with his series on Matthew. One morning last week, as I was washing the dishes at my kitchen sink, I listened to episode 37.

(Before you go thinking that’s a long time to spend on one book of the bible . . . this particular series is 800 episodes long.)

Matt started the episode by asking the listener – by asking me – to think of something beautiful, something good, something wonderful that I desperately wanted (and wanted for the right reasons), but was almost afraid to dare hope it might come true. He went on to talk about this tension we live in as human beings, about how we can see the promise of what things could be, but we’re surrounded by what is. He read beautiful, hope-filled passages from Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel, and then he talked about the coming of Jesus, about how Matthew’s original audience would have read his opening chapters and seen the promise of this glorious Kingdom, how all things would be made new and right, how the deepest and best longings of the human heart would be fulfilled.

And for a moment, as I listened to him describe this hope of the Kingdom, a longing for it welled up in me, strong, almost palpable.

I closed my eyes, fighting back tears. With all my being, I wanted the Kingdom to come here, to come now.

And then?

Then I picked up my soapy dishrag and I got back to the business of scrubbing the pots and pans in front of me.

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When we first moved onto this property and I assessed the (long, so very long) list of yard work awaiting me, pruning the roses was far down the list, behind clearing out the area for the vegetable garden and cutting back the grapevines and giving the fruit trees a long-overdue haircut.

I liked these other tasks. After all, they promised fresh fruit and veggies to fill stomachs and decrease grocery bills. All of my labor would have a tangible, practical result. There’s no question that tending the land in order to coax food from it is a necessary, valuable, productive endeavor.

Pruning roses, though, is another story altogether.

Flowers – and especially roses – are showy, extravagant, almost gaudy. Beauty for the sake of beauty, with no practical purpose whatsoever.

I’m not gonna lie; there’s a part of me that has felt a twinge of uncertainty each time I head out, pruners in hand, to peel back diseased leaves and trim dead branches and snip off last year’s dried blooms. It feels extra, somehow. Luxurious. Even – dare I say – privileged, to pour time and energy into tending flowers when there are so many other, more pressing, more important problems in the world to be solved.

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When the yearning for the coming sweetness of the Kingdom is so strong I can almost taste it, washing the dishes (and folding the laundry and mopping the floor and all the other quotidian household tasks that never end) seem, well, trivial.

I know. I know they aren’t trivial. I know these things matter. I know they’re necessary.

Because whatever else may be happening in the world or in our lives, there are six mouths in this home to feed, six bodies to keep clothed. Making the food to keep those bellies satisfied generates a lot of dishes. Washing the underwear and socks and shirts and pants takes time and effort.

(Have I mentioned yet that we are in the throes of potty training our youngest? She’s a stubborn, wild one, this sweet last child of mine. Washing, ahem, underwear and pants and dresses – and the floor, and young legs, and the toilet seat – takes time and effort.)

They’re necessary things. But when I start thinking about what it might mean to participate in the Kingdom of God here on earth, my daily chores aren’t exactly the first (or second, or third, or tenth) thing to come to mind.

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Who dares to spend time pruning rosebushes while the world burns? Shouldn’t I have more important things to do?

After all, there’s no guarantee I will even get the results I hope for. I trim and prune today, trusting and hoping that the Giver of life will see fit to bring out buds in due time.

And there, perhaps, is the answer: that seeking beauty, that hoping for it, is in fact its own kind of resistance. It’s one way (among many) of holding my own small candle against the dark, a cry that there’s good in this world worth fighting for, that though the future might seem bleak, all is not lost. It’s an act of hope, of generosity, of prayer, one that trusts that, though it might be winter now, spring will come.

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Most of my rosebushes are only just beginning to leaf out. But last week, I stepped out into my front yard, I noticed a pop of color, tucked there against the house.

A single rose, fully unfurled, vibrant and alive, a promise of all the good that’s yet to come.