There Is A New Leaf Coming

You saw it on Tuesday.

Tightly rolled, at the top, that particular green that is different from all the other green on the plant because it has not been open to anything yet.

And something went through you that was completely out of proportion.

You stood there. You looked at it for longer than you would admit. And then a second thing arrived, about four seconds later, which was the thought that this is a leaf and you are a grown adult.

And the gladness got taken down a notch, and then another, until it was the right size for a windowsill.

So the whole of this article is one sentence and everything else is commentary.

You were not overreacting on Tuesday. You were reacting.

There is hope of a tree

Job is in the middle of the worst argument of his life, and he reaches for an image from the ground.

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. (Job 14:7, King James Version)

For there is hope of a tree.

You are looking at the exact thing Job reached for in the worst week of his life, and a tender branch has never once been too small to be the image a man chose. Job 14:7 says there is hope of a tree, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over somebody who stood at a windowsill on Tuesday for longer than they would admit.

Notice where he is when he says it. Nothing about Job's situation is small, and nothing about it is resolved.

And what he reaches for is not a doctrine and not an argument. It is a stump with something coming out of it, which he has evidently seen, and which he is using because it is the most convincing thing he knows.

You are standing in front of the same evidence he was, and a rolled up leaf on a windowsill has never once been a lesser version of it. Job 14:7 says there is hope of a tree, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets an ordinary sight carry that weight.

The tender branch thereof will not cease. That is the phrase. And a man who has lost everything is holding a picture of new growth in his hand and putting weight on it.

You were not being sentimental about a small green thing, and the same image has never once been beneath a man in the middle of real grief. The Spirit of God is what makes that more than a literary observation, and Job 14 is where the hope of a tree is written down.

What the four seconds did

Now the practical half, and it is about the correction rather than the leaf.

Here is what happened on Tuesday, in order.

Something good was seen. A real response followed, in the body, immediately and without permission. And then four seconds later a second process started, which assessed the response against the size of the object and found it excessive.

That second process was not maturity. It has been called that, and it is not that. It is a habit of scaling, and it runs on almost everything good, and it is why the last several good things have arrived flatter than they should have.

You have a process that shrinks the good and leaves the bad at full size, and no correction like that has ever once been the same thing as being sensible. What is written in Job 14:7 puts hope in a tree without apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one who interrupts a habit of scaling.

And notice that it only runs one way. When something goes wrong you do not stand there afterward saying, now come on, that was only a small setback, let us be proportionate.

The scaling is applied to gladness only, and that asymmetry is not an accident, and it is worth seeing plainly.

You are running a rule that has only ever been applied to the good things, and nothing in the written word has ever once asked you to be proportionate about joy. The Spirit of God is the one who names that asymmetry, and Job 14 is the ground under it.

Look at it properly

So here is the instruction and it has two halves and the second one is the one that will cost something.

Look at it properly for one minute. Not a glance on the way past. A minute, standing there, with nothing else happening.

And then tell one person about it.

The second half is what makes it real, because a gladness that is never spoken stays private and a private gladness is easy to talk yourself out of later.

Tell somebody. Say it plainly. There is a new leaf coming on that plant and I was more pleased about it than I expected to be.

You have one true sentence and one person to say it to, and a small gladness spoken out loud has never once required anybody's agreement to be real. Job 14:7 puts weight on the tender branch, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence the short distance it has to travel.

They may not respond much. That is fine and it is not the point. The point is that you said it out loud, which is what makes it an event rather than an impression.

You are able to say a small good thing out loud without defending it, and one sentence about a leaf has never once needed anybody else to agree with it. Job 14:7 puts weight on a tender branch, and the Holy Spirit is the one with somebody saying a plain sentence to another human being.