An Earthy Balm for your Soul
A Feature Review of
Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
Jeff Chu
Hardcover: Convergent, 2025
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Reviewed by Cara Meredith
The scene is often the same when I open the sliding glass door to the patio and step into the backyard. The chirping of birds and the buzzing of bees greets me in full; an explosion of green and yellow and orange, brown and pink and red greet me with a silent shouting all their own. In this little urban oasis, grace and hope meet me on the regular. I am fed, in more ways than one, in a place where Creator and creation find a home under the sun and the stars.
I tell you this story because much of the same happened upon reading Jeff Chu’s newest book, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand. In a book described as a profound meditation of nature, heritage, and belonging, when the reader is transported back to a season when Chu himself quit his job as a magazine writer, applied to Princeton Seminary, and stumbled upon The Farminary, a twenty-one-acre working farm where “theological education is integrated with small-scale regenerative agriculture to train faith leaders who are conversant in the areas of ecology, sustainability, and food justice.” It is here that readers meet Chu, a writer, reporter, and editor-at-large, who is also, among other vocational identifiers, a Minister of Word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America (RCA). But it is also here, upon reading Chu’s reflective meditations, that we encounter the gifts a garden provides – gifts that include insights around hope, grace, and the reality of being human.
Woven alongside intimate reflections of identity, including his ethnicity, spirituality, sexuality, and gender, readers get new glimpses around that old word called hope. Take, for instance, the decayed husk of a tomatillo Chu found in the winter months at The Farminary: “An epitaph in gossamer” (71), the fruit “didn’t have to represent luck; I could just call it a messenger of hope.” To Chu, the single encounter with a tomatillo morphs into a reflection on a Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner and a meditation on prosperity theology – not before circling back to that effervescent thing called hope when he writes, “…the calling to live a good and loving life, to be a part of something that’s not individual but collective, to be in communion with other humans and beauty and the dead tomatillo and the whole fish on the table and the sky and the sea” (75). Time and time again, Chu names the hope we humans long for and desperately crave, in the world around us, with one another, and with God.
Equally, though, Chu’s writing centers on the reality of the human experience. Although readers who find a home in the Christian tradition will find particular resonance with his writing, he does not write exclusively toward a Christian audience. Instead, Good Soil centers itself deep into the things of the earth, and of what it means to simply be human in this place. Here, we learn to live in and embrace the bodies that are ours and ours alone; we lament the wrongs that have been done to us, as Chu so intimately accounts in a chapter entitled, “body,” and, if we’re lucky, we forget new ways forward. Of his own body, Chu writes, “This is the body with which I kneel in the garden to weed. This is the body that opens the plastic bags of rotting produce and stumbles toward the compost pile with the wheelbarrow. This is the body with which I strain against an uncooperative barn door” (156).
Even though Chu, like much of the rest of humanity, “can’t quite be persuaded” (157) of such extravagant grace toward his own body, it is in his wrestling that the reader finds resonance with what it means to be human in the world today.
Because then there is this thing called grace, which finds Chu when a text message from a friend sees him as he is and serves as a helpful reminder that “love pays attention” (61). Toward those who have wronged him, including his own family, Chu is changed by a grace threaded with love and forgiveness, that visits him in hard times and in good. As the title suggests, this grace becomes a kind of good soil where he can “simply lie down for a bit and rest,” where he might build a home, grow something, and even belong (198). In all of these places, grace moves into the neighborhood and makes itself known, first to him and then to us in turn.
Chu’s book won’t be for everyone, particularly for those more used to more journalistic interpretations of a story and a place. But for readers eager to pay attention to the gift of the everyday, particularly as it weaves and intersects with God and soil and humanity, Good Soil will be an honest, quippy balm to your neglected soul.
Cara Meredith
Cara Meredith is a writer, speaker, and part-time development director. The author of The Color of Life(Zondervan) and the forthcoming Church Camp (Broadleaf), she gets a kick out of playing with words. A lot. You can connect with her on her website, CaraMeredith.com.
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