She Chose It And I Have To Keep It

She chose it herself.

She went along the whole row, twice, and picked one for reasons she could not explain, and she carried it to the counter with both hands like it was something breakable.

And she has not stopped talking about it.

And you went quiet on the way home. Not visibly. You said all the right things. But somewhere between the counter and the car a whole scenario arrived fully formed, in which it dies in about five weeks and she is the one who finds it and she learns something from that which you cannot control.

So now there is a plant on the windowsill that you did not want to be responsible for and are now entirely responsible for.

Here is what I want to take away first, because everything else follows from it.

Nothing on that sill is scheduled to teach her a lesson.

Fear not little flock

Jesus says something to a small anxious group that is worth hearing in the register it was said in.

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. (Luke 12:32, King James Version)

Fear not, little flock.

You are addressed there as somebody small who is already provided for, and no scenario you built in a car has ever once been the thing that was actually coming. Luke 12:32 says fear not, little flock, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a mother driving home from a shop.

Notice how He speaks to them. Little flock. It is not a rebuke of their smallness or their nerves. It is almost tender, and it is said to people who had real reasons to be worried.

And then the reason given is not that things will go well. It is that it is the Father's good pleasure to give.

Good pleasure. Not duty, not reluctance, not a transaction. The disposition behind the giving is gladness, and that is what they are told to steady themselves on.

You were placed under a disposition of gladness rather than a schedule of lessons, and no plant in your house has ever once been an instrument of instruction. The Spirit of God is what makes that reachable on an ordinary Tuesday, and Luke 12 is where the good pleasure is written down.

Where the lesson idea comes from

Now the practical half, and it is worth being honest about the source of this.

The dread that arrived in the car was not about botany. It was about meaning.

Somewhere you picked up the idea that a child's experiences are curriculum. That each thing that happens is going to teach her something, and that a parent's job is to manage what gets taught.

That is an exhausting way to be a mother and almost nobody teaches it explicitly. It gets absorbed.

You are carrying a job nobody ever formally handed you, and an idea you absorbed has never once had the authority of an instruction. Luke 12:32 puts the giving in the Father's good pleasure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a weight that was never assigned.

And it is not true. A plant dying on a windowsill in a child's house teaches almost nothing by itself. What she will actually take from it is not the event. It is how the adults around her behaved during the event, and that is a completely different thing and a much smaller job.

You are responsible for how you are in a room and not for what every event means, and no dying plant has ever once been able to deliver a lesson by itself. What is written in Luke 12:32 puts the giving on the Father rather than the curriculum on the mother, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a syllabus off a windowsill.

And here is the practical consequence, which is a relief.

If the thing she will take is your manner rather than the outcome, then you do not have to keep it alive. You have to be ordinary about it. And ordinary is available to you even in a week when nothing else is.

You are able to do the thing that actually matters here without controlling the outcome at all, and being unremarkable about it has never once been the lesser option. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary manner possible, and Luke 12 is the ground under it.

Say nothing about how it is doing

So the instruction is a subtraction, and it is more specific than it sounds.

Let her water it. And say nothing about how it is doing.

Not: it looks good. Not: that one is drooping a bit. Not: we might need to move it, do you think.

Those all sound harmless. Every one of them installs the idea that the plant is being assessed, and a child who hears a plant assessed learns to assess it, and then she is standing in front of it doing what happened on that drive home.

You are able to leave one running commentary unsaid, and silence about a plant's condition has never once been the same as indifference to it. Luke 12:32 says fear not, little flock, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a mother's tongue kindly.

So while she waters, you say nothing about its condition. If she says something about it, answer plainly and briefly and do not build on it.

And if it dies, you say what a person says. That is sad. It happens with plants sometimes. Do you want to pick another one.

You are able to be plain in front of her without performing anything, and a short honest sentence has never once been too little to give a child. Luke 12:32 says it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a mother's voice ordinary.