She Kept Them All And Now It Is Me

There are eleven of them.

That is not something you knew until about three weeks ago. They were just there, the way the furniture was there, and she moved among them and you moved around them and neither of you ever said a word about it in forty years.

And now you are standing in the hall looking at eleven plants, and you do not know which ones she watered on which days, and you are aware that she did know, and that the knowing has gone.

Some of them are going. Two are not, for reasons you cannot determine.

And the size of it is the problem. Eleven is not a task. Eleven is a wall.

So the first thing I want to say is about the number, and it is not practical advice.

You do not have to do eleven.

The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart

David writes a line that names a condition and then says where God is in relation to it.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.

You are described exactly in that verse and located exactly in it too, and no state of a man has ever once put God further off than nigh. Psalm 34:18 says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man standing in a hall counting pots.

Notice it is a position rather than an activity. Nigh. Near. Close by.

Not: the Lord will fix this. Not: the Lord will explain it. Nigh, which is a statement about distance and nothing else.

And that is all a man in your position can actually use. Nothing is going to be fixed and nothing is going to be explained, and the one thing that is true is that there is somebody close.

You have company in a hall you are standing in alone, and the brokenness of a heart has never once been what pushes God away from it. The Spirit of God is what makes that a felt thing rather than a doctrine, and Psalm 34 is where the nearness is written down.

Eleven is not the number

Now the practical half, and it is entirely about arithmetic.

That hall does not hold eleven jobs. It holds one job, eleven times, and it does not have to be done in one go and nobody is counting.

Here is the honest position. Some of those eleven will go. Probably several, over the next year, and not because of anything done or left undone. She had forty years of knowing them and a man has three weeks, and no amount of effort closes that.

That sounds bleak and it is actually the opposite, because once some of them are allowed to go, the whole thing stops being a test to fail. And what is left is simpler: water one of them today.

You are permitted to take one out of eleven and call that the day's work, and one pot watered has never once been a lesser act than eleven. What is written in Psalm 34:18 draws near without requiring competence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reduces a wall back to a task.

And there is something in this that is worth saying plainly, because it is the real reason you are standing in the hall.

Doing it badly feels like a failure of her.

Every clumsy attempt feels like evidence of what she did effortlessly for forty years, and every plant that goes will feel like something of hers that you could not hold onto.

That is not true, and it is worth saying against.

You are not losing her twice when a plant goes, and forty years of a woman's care has never once been stored in eleven pots in a hall. The Spirit of God is the one who says that clearly, and Psalm 34 is the ground under the nearness.

One. The nearest.

So here is the instruction and it is deliberately smaller than you want it to be.

Water one of them today. The nearest. Not the one that looks worst, and not the one you think she cared about most.

The nearest, because choosing is where a man in a hall gets stuck, and the nearest requires no decision at all.

Do not look at the others. Do not count them again. Do not work out a rota, because a rota is a thing built by a man trying to do all eleven, and this is not all eleven. This is one. Tomorrow, if you want, do the next nearest. Or do the same one. Or do none.

You are able to do one small thing in a hall full of them, and refusing to make a plan has never once been the same as not caring what happens to them. Psalm 34:18 says the LORD is nigh, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing beside a man with a jug in a hallway.