My Grandmother Kept Everything Alive

Her house was full of them.

Every sill, the back step, two on the kitchen table, and a thing in a tin by the door that had been there longer than you had. None of it looked planned. It looked like weather, like it had simply happened around her over forty years.

And she never read anything about it. She never used a word for any of it. She watered when she went past and she talked while she did it.

And you have one pot that is not doing well, and a phone with three articles saved about it, and the whole thing feels like evidence of something.

So before any of the practical part, one sentence.

You are not competing with her. And she never entered.

Measuring themselves by themselves

Paul writes a line in Corinthians about a particular kind of comparison, and the verdict on it is unusually blunt.

But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise. (2 Corinthians 10:12, King James Version)

Measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves.

You are running a measurement the written word calls unwise rather than humble, and no comparison of yours has ever once produced a true reading. 2 Corinthians 10:12 says they are not wise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man standing in front of one struggling pot.

What is interesting is the word he chooses. Not wrong. Not sinful. Not wise.

Which is a comment on the method rather than on the heart. He is saying the instrument does not work. You cannot get a true reading of a man by holding him up against another man, because the scale has no fixed point on it.

And your particular comparison has a further problem, which is that you are measuring against forty years of somebody else's ordinary life, compressed into a memory, with all the failures edited out by time.

You are comparing one pot against a lifetime with the losses removed, and no memory of a full kitchen has ever once been a fair measure of a Tuesday. The Spirit of God is what makes that more than a consoling thought, and 2 Corinthians 10 is where the instrument is called unwise.

What she actually did

Now the practical half, and it is the most useful thing in this article.

Think about how she actually behaved around those plants, because you saw it.

She did not know anything. She had no method. She would have laughed at the idea of researching it.

What she had was proximity and repetition. She went past them constantly, every day, for decades, and she touched them while she was doing something else. The watering was not a task she performed. It was something that happened on the way to other things.

You have the same thing available to you in your own hallway, and proximity has never once been a skill somebody else was born with. 2 Corinthians 10:12 calls the measuring unwise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what he is actually looking at.

And the ones that died, died. You do not remember those, because a plant dying in a house with thirty of them is not an event. It was simply replaced or not, and nobody discussed it.

You have been trying to reproduce an outcome without the conditions that made it, and no amount of reading has ever once been able to substitute for walking past something daily. What is written in 2 Corinthians 10:12 calls the comparison unwise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what he is actually looking at.

So if you wanted to be like her, and I am not sure you should, the way would not be to learn more. It would be to have one plant somewhere you constantly walk past, for years, and to be relaxed about the ones that go.

The three saved articles are the least like her thing in this whole situation.

You are allowed to put the reading down and simply go past it, and knowing less about it has never once made you worse at it. The Spirit of God is the one who releases a man from research, and 2 Corinthians 10 is the ground under the comparison.

Your own way

And now the harder half, which is about her rather than about plants.

Part of what is happening at that windowsill is that you miss her.

A full house of plants is one of the clearest pictures anybody has of who she was, and keeping one going is a way of staying near it. And when that one struggles, something more than a plant seems to be failing, and it feels like being unable to carry something forward.

You are grieving a woman at a windowsill, and that has never once been a strange or sentimental place for it to show up. 2 Corinthians 10:12 refuses the comparison, and the Spirit of God is the one who names the missing without making it smaller.

That is not a foolish feeling. It is a real one, and it is worth saying rather than managing.

But the carrying forward is not in the plant. It is in you, and it already happened, and it happened while she was watering things and talking to you in that kitchen.

You are already carrying what she gave you, and no pot on your sill has ever once been the thing that holds it. 2 Corinthians 10:12 refuses a comparison as the measure of a man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps an inheritance where it actually lives.