Downhill For Two Weeks And I Do Not Know Why

You turned the leaf over again this morning.

You have done that about nine times in two weeks. You lift it, tilt it to the light, look at the underside, look at the stem where it joins, look at the soil.

There is nothing there. There has never been anything there.

And it is still going. Slowly. The one at the bottom went first, then the two next to it, and now the ones further up are doing the thing where the edges go before the middle.

And you have adjusted everything. You moved it, then moved it back. You watered more, then less. You looked things up, and every list gave you six possible causes, and your plant has some of the symptoms of all six.

Here is what has actually been happening in those two weeks, and it is not about the plant.

Every time you turn that leaf over you are looking for what you did.

A bruised reed shall he not break

There is a description of Christ in Isaiah, and what it says about damaged things is the point.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. (Isaiah 42:3, King James Version)

A bruised reed is a stalk that has been crushed. It is no use for anything. Nobody would keep it, and the ordinary thing to do with a damaged reed is to snap it and throw it away.

You are being handled by somebody who does not snap what is nearly finished, and no damaged thing has ever once been assessed in those hands before being kept. Isaiah 42:3 refuses to break the bruised reed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman turning a leaf over for the ninth time.

And smoking flax is a wick that has gone out. There is no flame left. It is smoking, which is what a wick does in the seconds after the light has gone, and the natural response is to pinch it out and be done.

And the verse says he does not do either of those.

Now, this is written about how God handles people and not plants, and I am not going to pretend a verse about the gentleness of the Messiah is advice about a windowsill. Your plant is a plant.

You have been bringing judgment into a room where God brings none, and the hunt for a fault has never once been the posture He takes toward a thing that is failing. The Spirit of God is what makes that land in a body, and it stands written in Isaiah 42 that he shall not quench the smoking flax.

Things die without anybody being to blame

Here is the sentence I actually came to break, and it is a true sentence about the world that almost nobody applies to a windowsill.

Things die without anybody being to blame.

Living things fail for reasons nobody can see. Something in the roots that was there when you got it. A bad season. A change in the air. An insect that came and went during a working day.

Whole greenhouses of experts lose plants and cannot always say why, and those are people who do this for a living with equipment you do not have.

So this is not me being kind to you. This is not do not blame yourself offered as a comfort. It is that the chain of cause you have been assuming, from your own attention to that leaf, is not there.

You are searching a chain of cause that does not run through you, and an unexplained decline has never once meant the explanation was something about you. What is written in Isaiah 42:3 handles the nearly finished thing without assessing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who breaks a link a woman has been carrying for two weeks.

And the not knowing is the part that makes this worse rather than better, which is backwards, and worth naming. An unexplained loss feels like it must have a cause hidden in you somewhere, because if there were an ordinary cause somebody would have found it.

That is not how it works. Most of what happens in a pot is simply not visible from a kitchen.

You were never given the equipment to see what is happening down there, and the not seeing has never once been a failure of care on your part. The Spirit of God is the one who says that plainly, and Isaiah 42 is the ground it is said from.

The adjusting is the thing to stop

Now the practical half, and it may be uncomfortable.

The likeliest thing hurting that plant now is the last two weeks of intervention.

Look at what has happened. It started to decline for some reason nobody can identify. You noticed, and you began to help: moved it, watered it differently, moved it again, moved it back.

Each of those was a reasonable response and every one of them was a change. A plant handles change slowly. It responds to a new position over about two weeks, and by then it has been moved twice more, so it has never once been given long enough to settle anywhere.

You have been doing the opposite of neglect this whole time, and six changes in two weeks has never once been the behavior of somebody who did not care. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates the caring from the adjusting, and Isaiah 42:3 is where the bruised reed is kept without being handled to death.

So the most useful thing available is not another correction. It is stillness.

And here is why that is so hard. Doing nothing feels like giving up, and if the plant then dies during a week of no intervention, the verdict lands squarely on the one who stopped.

That is why the link had to go first. If a plant can die without anybody being at fault, then leaving it alone is not a gamble with your own guilt. It is just the sensible thing.

You are able to leave it still for seven days, and stillness has never once been the same as giving up on something. The written word will not snap the bruised reed or pinch out the smoking wick, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with you through the week.