I Want To Throw It Out And I Feel Guilty

You want it gone.

Not because you are hard. Because every time you come into that room there it is, doing its slow thing, and something in you has started to brace before you even get through the door.

And the wanting it gone arrives with its own escort, which is the guilt.

Because a person who throws out a struggling plant is a certain kind of person. Somebody who quits. Somebody who does not stay. And you know exactly what it would mean about you, and so the pot stays where it is, and you brace at the door, and this has been going on for weeks.

So let me put the honest thing at the front.

The wanting is not a betrayal. The wanting is information, and it has been filed under the wrong heading.

A time to keep and a time to cast away

Ecclesiastes has a list in it that almost everybody has heard and almost nobody reads slowly.

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. (Ecclesiastes 3:6, King James Version)

A time to keep, and a time to cast away.

You are living inside a list that names both of those without ranking them, and casting away has never once been the lesser half of that verse. Ecclesiastes 3:6 sets keeping and casting side by side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman bracing in a doorway.

Look at how the list is built. Every pair is two real things, each with an hour. A time to get and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to cast away.

Nowhere in it does the writer mark one half as faithfulness and the other half as failure. There is no asterisk. There is no note underneath saying that the casting away is for people with weaker character.

And that matters, because you have been operating with exactly that asterisk written into your understanding for weeks now.

You were handed a rule that keeping is loyal and letting go is quitting, and nothing in the written word has ever once put those two on different footings. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an invented rule off a woman, and Ecclesiastes 3 is the ground it comes off on.

What the bracing at the door is telling you

Now the practical half, and it is not about the plant at all.

There is something happening in your body every time you come into that room, and it is worth taking seriously rather than overriding.

A living thing you cannot help, sitting in your sightline, several times a day, is a genuine load. Not a dramatic one. A small persistent one, which is a different thing and in some ways harder, because there is never a moment big enough to justify dealing with it.

So the bracing is not weakness. The bracing is an accurate readout of a real cost that has been running for weeks.

You have been carrying an actual weight and calling it an attitude problem, and your own body has never once lied to you about that doorway. What is written in Ecclesiastes 3:6 gives an hour to the casting away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a true reading from a character flaw.

And here is what I want to be careful about, because there are two failures available here and only one of them gets talked about.

The first is letting go of a thing too early, out of impatience. Everybody warns about that one.

The second is keeping a thing long past the point where keeping it is doing anybody any good, out of fear of what the letting go would say about you. Nobody warns about that one, and it is much more common, and it costs far more.

You are allowed to name the second one out loud, and holding on past the point of any use has never once been the safer sin. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that sayable, and Ecclesiastes 3:6 is where both hours are written down.

Neither answer is the brave one

So here is the thing that will actually break this open, and it may not be what you expect.

I am not telling you to throw it out.

It may be that you keep it. It may be that you read all this and decide the plant stays, and that would be a completely good outcome, because it would be a decision instead of a paralysis.

What I am taking away is the idea that one of the two options is the brave one and the other is the cowardly one. That framing is the whole problem. It is why nothing has happened for weeks, and it is why the wanting arrives with guilt attached.

Keeping it is not noble. Letting it go is not a failure. Both are ordinary, both are permitted, and the verse names both.

What is not permitted, in the sense that it costs you something every day, is the third option you have been running, which is to want it gone and not act and brace at the door and carry the guilt.

You are free to choose either one of them with a clear conscience, and there has never once been a brave answer and a cowardly answer in that doorway. Ecclesiastes 3:6 names the hour for keeping and the hour for casting away, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a paralysis without dictating the outcome.