I Check It Every Day

Every day. Sometimes twice.

You go over, you look at it, you put a finger in the soil, and most times you give it a little water because you are standing there and it seems like the thing to do.

And you know. You have read the thing everybody reads, which says most people overwater, and you recognized yourself in it immediately, and it changed nothing at all.

Because knowing was never the problem.

I want to start somewhere different from where those articles start, because they all treat this as an error to be corrected and it is not an error.

What is happening at that windowsill is not bad technique. It is worry with a watering can in its hand.

Be still and know

There is a line in the Psalms that gets used as a soothing sentence and is actually an instruction issued in the middle of chaos.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

Be still, and know that I am God.

You are being told to stop moving rather than to try harder, and stillness has never once been what somebody says to a person who is failing. Psalm 46:10 says be still, and know that I am God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman with a finger in the soil for the second time today.

Read the psalm around it. The earth is being removed, the mountains are being carried into the sea, the heathen are raging.

And into that, be still.

That is not a soothing sentence. That is the hardest possible instruction, given at the hardest possible moment, and it is given as a command rather than as advice, which tells you that the people receiving it were not going to arrive at it on their own.

You were never going to arrive at stillness by deciding to be calmer, and no amount of reading about it has ever once produced it in anybody. The Spirit of God is what makes stillness possible rather than merely recommended, and Psalm 46 is where the command is written down.

The water is not the point

Now the practical half, and the facts are quick.

Roots need air as well as water. Soil that is constantly wet holds no air, and roots in airless soil cannot take up water at all, which is why a plant that is being overwatered looks exactly like a plant that is thirsty.

That is the cruelty of it. The plant looks dry and droopy, and the response is more water, and more water makes it worse, and the loop closes.

So the practical answer is four days of nothing. Not as a punishment. To let air back into the soil.

You have been doing the most sensible looking thing available, and a plant that looks thirsty while drowning has never once been a thing anybody guesses correctly. What is written in Psalm 46:10 asks for stillness in the middle of something that looks urgent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes doing nothing possible for four days.

But the water is not the point, and I said that at the top and I mean it.

Here is what is actually happening on those trips to the windowsill. Something in your life is not settled, and it is not the plant, and the plant is the one thing in the house you can go and do something about.

Every check is a small act of management performed on the one object that will hold still for it.

You are managing something you can reach because something you cannot reach is unsettled, and no trip to that windowsill has ever once been about the soil. The Spirit of God is the one who names that without embarrassing anybody, and Psalm 46 is the ground under the stillness.

Put the can out of sight

So here is the instruction and it has two halves, and the second half is what makes the first one possible.

No water for four days.

And put the watering can out of sight. In a cupboard, under the sink, in another room. Not on the counter where you can see it.

That second half is not a gimmick. The can on the counter is a standing invitation, and a standing invitation defeats a resolution every time. Removing the object removes about half the trips before you ever have to decide anything.

And when the urge comes anyway, and it will come on day two, go and do something with your hands that is not the plant. Wash something. Fold something. Anything with hands in it.

You are able to give your hands a different job for four days, and moving a watering can out of sight has never once been a trick played on yourself. Psalm 46:10 says be still, and know that I am God, and the Holy Spirit is the one with you on day two when it feels like negligence.