Watering What Never Moves

The question went around the circle clockwise, which meant she had eleven women's worth of time to think of something.

Name one way you are different than you were a year ago. That was the question, written on an index card and read warmly, the way you read a thing you believe will be a blessing.

The answers were good. Somebody had started calling her sister again. Somebody said she had quit apologizing for taking up space. One woman just cried and said her husband had come back to church, and the room did the thing rooms do, all the hands going out at once.

Then it got to her.

She said she thought maybe she was a little more patient in traffic. There was a small laugh, kind, the kind that lets a person off, and the question moved on, and she sat there for the rest of the hour with a paper cup going cold in her hand and heard the sentence again in her own voice. More patient. In traffic. She has been following Jesus since she was nineteen.

She is at the kitchen sink now, home, with the light going long across the counter.

On the windowsill above the faucet there is a Christmas cactus in a terracotta pot with a chip on the rim. It came from her husband's mother, wrapped in newspaper, on a hot day. The saucer under it has a white ring of mineral baked onto it, and she fills the plastic pitcher and waters that plant on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and has done for six years.

The plant has not moved.

Not dead. That is the maddening part. If it had died she would have thrown it out and been sad and been done. It is green. It is upright. It sits in exactly the shape it has always sat in, and twice she has photographed it months apart and could not tell the two pictures apart.

Six years of Tuesdays and Saturdays. Six years of carrying the pitcher over.

And she is standing there with the water going in and thinking, without any drama about it at all, that this is the truest picture of her life with God that has ever been in her house.

You know that windowsill. Maybe yours is thirty years instead of six, and maybe nobody asked you out loud, and maybe you asked yourself in the car and got the same silence back. There is nothing wrong with you for coming up empty in that circle. But we have to talk about what that circle was actually measuring.

The visible part was never the report

Here is the first thing, and it is a relief, and I want to say it before anything else in case you close the tab.

Nothing in Scripture ever asks you to produce a list. Not one line of it makes a believer the auditor of her own soul, or hands anybody a card at the end of the year to fill out. That question in the circle was warmly meant and it was answering a real longing, and it also asked eleven women to do a job God never assigned to any of them.

You are not the accountant of this work, and you were never handed the ledger. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began a good work in you is the One carrying it through to completion, which is written and is not a sentiment, and it is His Spirit doing the carrying while you stand at a sink with a pitcher.

Think about what a plant actually spends its first years doing. Everybody knows this and nobody applies it to themselves. It goes down. Root hair, then root, then root plate, in the dark, in the exact months when the person watching it decides nothing is happening. There is a whole architecture being built under that terracotta and the only thing on the report is a green shape that does not change.

Where the psalm puts the flourishing

Read this one carefully, because it locates the growing somewhere most of us never think to look.

Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:13-14

Planted in the house. Flourishing in the courts. Not flourishing in the self assessment, not flourishing in the circle on a Thursday night, not flourishing in a way that reliably shows up on the second photograph. The psalm ties the whole thing to a location, and the location is Him.

That is the written word's own picture, and the Spirit of God is the one who put you into that soil, and nothing about the arrangement rests on your ability to describe it afterward. You are planted, which is a thing that was done to you and not a thing you achieved.

And notice how the psalm handles time, because it does something almost nobody does. It goes long. Fruit in old age. It refuses to be impressed by the speed of anything, and it never once suggests that the quiet years were a problem to be explained.

I am glad and I am indignant, both at once, writing this. Glad, because that is such good news for a woman with a paper cup going cold. Indignant, because somebody handed her a measuring tape and called it a blessing. You have a God who is not asking you for evidence, and He has never once asked you to prove the work by naming it. His word says He knows those who are His and He is the one who searches the heart, and it is His Spirit, not your memory, who has the whole account of the last six years.

The one person worst placed to see it

Here is the comedy of standing this close to your own life: nobody alive is worse positioned to notice the changing than the person it is happening to.

You were there for every single second of it, which means every change arrived by a slope so gradual it never registered as change. Ask the people who have known you fifteen years instead. They will not describe what you would describe. They will say something about how you handle waiting rooms. Or about a sentence you used to finish and now let go. Or about a stretch of years when they braced whenever your name came up, and how long it has been since anyone braced.

You were being changed the entire time you were unable to report it, and the inability to report it is not evidence of anything. Scripture says the Spirit bears witness with our spirit, which means the witness is His and not a performance you are failing, and a thing can be perfectly true in a room where nobody can prove it.

And I want to set something plain right here in the middle of it. If the reason you cannot name a change is that a fog has been sitting over the last several years, if things have gone flat and gray and you cannot feel much of anything, please bring somebody into it with you. Start with a doctor, because a body and a mood are not separate departments. A counselor with an office and a real appointment already booked. A pastor who gets the version you do not tell the circle. Nothing in that is a step down from prayer: God has always worked through hands and offices and appointments, and He is working through them now. And if your nights have started leaning toward wanting out altogether, dial 988 tonight before the lights go off, or the crisis line closest to your house, and get one human being near enough to stand at that windowsill with you.