The Big Difference Between Striving and Thriving
Photo by Janelle Pol
Plants do not live in my care.
The record of longevity goes to a plant I purchased at Home Depot in college. I Googled “plants that are hard to kill” and then bought one of those “air plants” that in theory should stay alive until the apocalypse. I watered it despite the instructions because, after all, as a Biology major I knew best. Once every few days the plant would spend a night in the refrigerator because I arbitrarily decided it was overheating on the windowsill. The plant lived for about 3 months.
All that is to say that I have no clue what makes a plant thrive. The Bible talks a lot about us thriving and flourishing, and the metaphor used is usually a plant or tree with deep roots in rich soil near flowing waters. Thriving, according to the Bible, has nothing to do with external circumstances and everything to do with what’s happening below the surface.
For a long time, I also didn’t know how to thrive. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize I can’t “self-help” my way into maturity and a full life. Just like I can’t drench a plant in water and put it in the fridge and hope for the best.
There was a time in my life when my goal was simply to survive. Quite literally.
I remember sitting in one doctor’s office after another, each with walls a different shade of pastel blue or yellow, and some with white noise machines hissing on the other side of the door. My teenage angst had spiraled into full-blown depression and an eating disorder. At that point in my life, I felt completely invisible and disconnected.
I was repeatedly told the goal of life is not surviving, but thriving. “How can we get you there?” the doctors would ask. That, it turns out, is an important question.
THE NEVER-ENDING STRIVING
The idea of having to graduate from an Ivy League college, get a dream job and love doing it, have tons of friends, be esteemed in a community, make lots of money, exercise, smile, eat vegetables and have a family...was exhausting. Until I realized we don’t thrive because we strive. We thrive because we plant ourselves with deep roots into the ever-flowing water that is the source of life.
If you had come up to me on the street last week and asked me if I was “living my best life,” which I assume is millennial speak for “thriving,” I probably would have ignored you completely — let’s face it, I am a New Yorker after all — rolled my eyes, and shuddered at the influx of memories of sitting in those offices talking about this topic.
And the truth is, looking from the outside, I’m not sure I’d put my life in the category of “thriving.”
Most days I leave work extremely frustrated. I sublet a room smaller than the pastel offices I described above, and I am far from my family. I sometimes eat candy for dinner, and most vegetables I buy turn rotten and end up in the trash. I’m not exactly the poster child for “crushing it.”
But man, I finally get it.
WHAT THRIVING LOOKS LIKE
This is what thriving looks like: It’s community that becomes family. It’s making a home wherever you lay your head. It’s finding opportunities for fulfillment in every conversation. It's staying humble and having a servant’s heart in a frustrating career. It’s evaluating myself through God’s eyes - not my own or others’.
Without realizing it and simply because of the goodness of God, I have become a thriving plant.
Sometimes I’m an exiled plant that doesn’t look like the rest in the garden. Other times I’m a hibernating plant. Can anyone ever truly predict whether an orchid will bloom again? I have one that hasn’t bloomed in two years, but it’s still doing well. And often I’m an ugly, prickly cactus in the middle of a desert. But God is growing me in my quiet disciplines of seeking Him, and even cacti grow beautiful flowers. He calls us a beautiful lily, a rose in a garden of thorns.
I don’t think this is what my teenaged self envisioned when asked what it would look like to thrive. It’s nothing like what I imagined, but more than I could have hoped for. Deep roots planted in good soil by abundant water have allowed me to bear fruit in all seasons.
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Danielle lives in Washington Heights and works as a physician assistant in the Bronx. She currently owns zero plants. (Between writing this article and it being published, the orchid has died and is now compost!)