Oakland Elementary School was seven blocks from my home if one were inclined to walk the most direct route there. My sisters and I had no such inclinations, even on rainy spring mornings. Especially on rainy spring mornings.

That was the time of day the earthworms were most plentiful, squiggling their way through the ground to the edge between grass and sidewalk. Plump reddish-brown earthworms, begging for attention from schoolchildren. What followed was probably not one of the finest moments in my life. Closing our umbrellas, we used the pointy end of the handles to see how many worms we could stab at a time. The loser had to pull off the worms with her bare hands and toss them back in the grass.

Fortunately, my history with earthworms evolved when Wil and I discovered vermiculture, worm composting. We actually paid for red wigglers to be shipped to the house. “They look exactly like the ones I used to stab,” I declared delightedly to Wil.

These worms, however, were destined for a brighter future. Wil carefully drilled holes in the bottom of a Rubbermaid bin and lined the bottom with shredded black and white newspaper. He then soaked a brick of cocoa mulch in a bucket of water and added that to the bin. The worms were ready for their home and a diet of coffee grounds, vegetable and fruit scraps and eggshells.

Then we waited. We waited for the worms to devour the food scraps and turn them into nutrient-rich compost. Some of the worms loved cantaloupe rinds, and after feasting on one, left a rind that almost looked like lace. We were fascinated with our new self-contained, garbage-eating pets.

After what seemed like an eternity, all that remained of the food scraps was the lace-like rind and a few pieces of eggshell, and in its place was dark rich compost—black gold for our garden. We began to remove the compost with our bare hands, uncovering earthworms as we went.

We kept scooping; the red wigglers, well, kept wiggling, through our hands into the thin layer of compost now covering the bottom of the bin. We could read our pets well and quickly covered them with shredded newspaper, cocoa mulch and fresh food scraps.

As we scooped out the compost, we observed a few things. First, and most obvious, was the lack of smell. The food scraps we tossed in the bin didn’t smell like rotten trash, even though they sat there for several weeks. Second, one has to make a time commitment to vermiculture. Good compost doesn’t happen overnight. Third, when exposed to the sunlight, the worms would borough deeper into the compost. They needed the darkness and the rotting fruit to produce that black gold for the garden.

Along with considering birds of the air and lilies of the field, perhaps we ought to consider the red wiggler. It doesn’t fear the darkness or potential rotting food scraps. Instead, it slowly goes through the rot and darkness and turns it into rich compost that I feed my sun-loving tomatoes and roses.

I might adopt the red wiggler approach to the darkness of trials and suffering I encounter. Rather than my usual fix-it-fast-and-fix-it-now approach, I will sit in the darkness (note to self: darkness is not dark to our loving Father) and know that this trial produces a rich compost of endurance, character and hope that does not put us to shame.

This rich compost—a mix of suffering and trust in God--also produces lives that look less like us and more like Christ, lives ready to share this compost with other weary souls sitting in a golden darkness.