"Hope, the Greatest Indeterminacy of All"

Tonight I watched an episode of Joan of Arcadia, a now-cancelled CBS television series.  In it, God shows up and tells Joan to plant a garden on her high school's property as a physics project. But all her usual study-friends desert her. The flunkies throw their contraband cigarette butts and empty slushy cups onto it. Joan feels like it's all a failure and she has no idea what's going on. But people notice the momentum of the project and start helping. Eventually there's a garden gnome made out of garbage, mums to attract pollinating bees, and Judith - who's been struggling with feeling isolated - joins in at the last minute, planting flower bulbs deep in the soil. They read their assignment's premise aloud to their class, "We offer our garden as an inquiry into the nature of hope, the greatest indeterminacy of all." As tends to be the case with a commitment to hope, just as the class is meditating on that poetic line, a bulldozer shows up to destroy the garden. But Judith stands to her feet in front of it, until the class rallies behind her cheering her name, and she's carried out of the way of the machinery. Then God tells Joan 1) that the crocuses and tulips her friend was planting will sprout and bloom in the spring even though the ground got bulldozed, and Judith knew that; and 2) that even though the garden was destroyed, what Joan planted and tended by being involved in "the process", grew. The scene cuts to a picture of Judith smiling.