It Came When I Had Given Up On It

You stopped about six weeks ago.

Not dramatically. You did not decide anything. You just stopped going over, and then stopped noticing that you had stopped, and it moved into the category of things in the room rather than things you do.

And on Sunday you looked at it properly for the first time in a while.

There is new growth on it. Quite a lot of it.

And the feeling that arrived was not pleasure. It was something much stranger and it took a while to name, and what it turned out to be was a small private insult.

It did better without you.

That is not a sentence anybody says out loud about a houseplant, and it is not a sentence that sounds serious when it is written down. It arrived anyway, on a Sunday, in a quiet flat, and it has been sitting there since, and the smallness of the occasion has not made it any easier to put down.

He knoweth not how

Jesus tells a very short parable about a man who sows seed and then does something quite ordinary.

And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. (Mark 4:26-27, King James Version)

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.

You are described exactly in that parable, and growth that happens while somebody sleeps has never once been a reflection on the one who sowed. Mark 4:27 says the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who stopped going over six weeks ago.

Notice what the man does in the story. He sleeps, and rises, night and day.

That is not a description of effort. It is a description of an ordinary life going on, and the point of it is that the growing happens in a compartment the man has no access to.

And the phrase at the end is the whole thing. He knoweth not how. Not: he did it wrong. Not: he should have been more attentive. He simply does not know how it works, and the story treats that as the normal condition rather than as a failure.

You were never in charge of the part that was actually happening, and the not knowing how has never once been an accusation in that parable. The Spirit of God is what makes that a release rather than a diminishment, and Mark 4 is where the sleeping and the rising are written down.

What the insult actually is

Now the practical half, and it is about the feeling rather than the plant.

The insult has a specific shape and it is worth naming precisely.

It is not that you feel unnecessary. It is that you had believed your attention was the thing keeping it going, and six weeks of no attention disproved that, and the disproof came with growth attached.

So two things were lost at once. The belief that you were holding it together, and the pleasure of the new growth, which got swallowed by the first thing.

You have given up a good thing in exchange for a small correction about yourself, and that swap has never once been one anybody would make on purpose. What is written in Mark 4:27 puts the growing outside the man entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates the growth from the verdict.

And here is the thing that is actually true about the six weeks, which is not what it looks like.

The plant did not do better because you left it alone. It probably did better because of the season, or because it had finally settled after a move, or for reasons nobody in the world could name.

You did not cause it and your absence did not cause it. Both of those are the same error, which is the belief that what happens in a pot runs through you.

You are not the variable in that pot, and six weeks of absence has never once been a treatment any more than six weeks of attention was. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a woman out of the middle of it, and Mark 4 is the ground under the not knowing.

Water it normally

So here is the instruction and it is deliberately unremarkable.

Go and water it today. Normally. The way you would water anything.

Not making up for six weeks. Not resuming a relationship. Not standing there afterward examining it.

And here is why unremarkable is the instruction. Because the two available overreactions are both wrong. One is throwing yourself back into it now that it is doing well, which puts a person back in the middle of something they are not in the middle of. The other is leaving it alone forever on the grounds that it evidently does better that way, which is the same error facing the other direction.

You have two obvious responses in front of you and both of them are the same mistake, and neither one has ever once been the ordinary thing. Mark 4:27 has a man simply sleeping and rising, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the unremarkable option visible.

Neither. Water it normally. Let that be the whole of your involvement.

You are able to be ordinary about it, and watering something normally has never once been the same as taking credit or refusing it. Mark 4:27 has a man sleeping and rising while something grows, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman doing something completely unremarkable on a Sunday.