It’s the end of the summer, and I’ve been thinking about summers when I was young, when my family used to spend time on the tobacco farm in eastern NC where my dad had grown up. My grandparents’ farm wasn’t particularly large, but during those hot summer days, it became for me and my brother and sisters, and any cousins visiting, the ultimate playground.

For at least a couple hours a day, my father tried to inculcate a farmer’s work ethic in us by making us work in the fields near the house, where they grew vegetables. We would pick green beans, corn, and peas and then spend time on the porch with my grandmother–stringing, hulling, and shucking the vegetables she would later cook up for dinner. On other days, we’d take big mixing bowls and venture out to pick blackberries. Those we didn’t eat on the spot usually found their way into a homemade cobbler.

When released from our farm chores, we roamed those eighty or so acres freely. We wandered down to the creek to play. We built a fort in a patch of woods. We lined it with stones from the creek and made rudimentary furniture out of scrap wood. We played hide and seek in and among the outbuildings—the barns, smokehouses, and curing house.

Many of my most evocative childhood memories are rooted in the time spent on that farm, playing with cousins and siblings, picking the food we ate, and enjoying lingering meals with family.

But time has a way of tampering with the pristine scenes of childhood. Over the years, I have watched the farm slowly deteriorate. When I was very young, the farm outbuildings were still in use. As years passed, they became more cluttered, filled with dust and cobwebs. The truth is that the farm of my father’s childhood was already in decline when it was becoming his children’s personal playground.

In my late teens, after my grandparents had died, I recall walking with my dad down the gravel road to the old barn and through overgrown fields, listening to stories from his days growing up. I heard notes of nostalgic regret in his voice as we passed through the remnants of what his father and mother had worked so hard to build but that had begun to fall apart ever since they passed away. He sometimes talked about fixing up the old farm buildings. He talks less about it now, but on occasion, I see a twinge of sadness pass across his face when he steps foot in the house his mother kept, where his sister now lives, and when he walks through the fields where he once worked alongside his father. I see it too when we go to the rural Methodist church he used to attend, where the small congregation of Christians who raised him up is shrinking, getting older, and passing away.

In our adult years, my siblings and I have made fewer trips to that farm in eastern NC. On one of my visits a few years ago, during the heat of early summer, I brought my husband, who showed admirable enthusiasm as I led him around all the places that had seemed magical as a kid and that now seemed overgrown, dilapidated, and well, unimpressive.

When I’ve driven away from the farm in my adult years, I’ve usually felt a bittersweet mix of grateful nostalgia for what the place has represented in the life of my family—the ways that God has used it to reveal goodness and beauty to us—and the lingering sadness of knowing that it won’t last. On this particular departure, however, I felt a growing tightness in my throat as we drove north to our home in Virginia. I wasn’t just sad. I was agitated. Perhaps there was something about showing the farm to someone who, try as he might, could never see it as it existed in my mind’s eye. By the time we had children, I wondered, would there be anything left of that family farm to inspire their imaginations?

I was bothered by more than just the declining family farm. I thought of the older cousin who graciously used to play with me, of the desolation on her face at the funeral of her precious three-year old daughter that year. I thought of her father, my uncle, who was fighting prostate cancer at the time. My aunt, who lived on the farm, was in the early, worrisome phase of discovering that she had cancer.

When you’re young, you sometimes feel insulated from the harsh realities of a broken world. But given enough time, we all experience it to some degree, don’t we? The fear that in the end much of what we strive to accomplish won’t add up to much, the knowledge that we will bury people we love dearly, the realization that our own bodies are gradually weakening.

We need to hope in a God who can transform those realities. Against our backdrop of brokenness, Jesus came into the world and got his hands dirty. I am so moved by that knowledge. He—the Creator of all things—became the son of a carpenter, crafting beautiful, functional pieces with his father, knowing all the while that they would some day break or rot. Yet he must have valued the work and the workmanship. He touched and brought healing to many people whose frail bodies were racked by illness or deformity. And he felt deep pain when his friend Lazarus died, so much that he wept openly when standing outside his tomb.

I used to wonder, why would Jesus weep when he knew that within a matter of minutes he would raise Lazarus from the dead? He knew that death had no final power in his presence. He reassured Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this” (John 11:25-26)? Nonetheless, when confronted with the spectacle of Lazarus’s tomb and the bitter mourning of loved ones, John tells us that Jesus was deeply moved and troubled, and that he wept (John 11:33-35).

I find it both astounding and deeply comforting to know that Jesus fully experienced grief over the loss and pain he encountered that day even when he knew the ultimate outcome of it all.  His eternal view did not mean that the pain of that moment was trivial in his sight. After all, who more than he knew what it was like to create a world in perfect wholeness and beauty and then see that world, and the humans he loved above all, fall prey to sin and death? And who better than Jesus understood the high cost of restoring life to us all? And yet he took on all that pain so that we might have life beyond the grave and see the world we love made new.

In the years since that visit to the farm, there have been new signs of life on the farm. The land is being leased and new irrigation systems have been put in and crops planted. My aunt has moved across the spectrum from a bleak outlook in her fight with cancer to a miraculous state of complete remission. She is glowing with hope and gratitude. My uncle’s cancer too appears to be completely gone. And in the midst of bitter grieving, there have been occasions for displays of faith and love.

God’s fingerprints of life-restoring love have been evident all over the place. I now look at my own daughter and wonder what places will captivate her imagination and reveal God’s goodness to her. I haven’t yet taken her to the family farm, but one day I will, and when I do, I’ll walk with her down those gravel roads and paths like I used to do with my dad (maybe he’ll come along), and tell her stories.