Six Slips In The Ground

Six. He counted them out and then counted them again, and there is a seventh in the tray that he has decided not to plant, which he is aware makes no sense.

The strip is about four yards by one, up against the back wall where the drainage is not good, which he knows because he has been in this ground twice before.

The first time was ambitious. Raised beds, a plan drawn out on paper, and about four hundred pounds he did not really have. It was doing well until a summer that everybody around here still refers to by name.

The second time was smaller and it failed for reasons he still cannot fully account for, which is worse.

So: six slips, in a strip, with a trowel that belonged to his father in law.

And what he has not done, and will not do, is say anything to anybody about it. His wife knows because she can see out of the kitchen window. He has not used a single word about what he is doing out here, and if she asked he would say he was tidying up.

The sentence is not this probably will not work either. It is: if I say out loud that I am starting again, then the third failure will be a thing that happened to somebody who should have known better.

You know that strip. It might be a garden, or a habit, or something you are doing quietly with no announcement. You are beginning without permitting yourself to call it beginning, because naming it would put something at stake that you cannot afford to lose a third time.

What forgetting actually is there

There is a sentence in Philippians that has been used to tell people to get over things, and that is not what the word is doing.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.Philippians 3:13

The forgetting in that sentence is not amnesia and Paul is not recommending it. Two verses earlier he lists his own history in detail, so he plainly has not forgotten anything. What the word carries is the sense of no longer reaching back for something, no longer letting it set the terms.

And the man writing it had a past with real failure in it, including things he names elsewhere without flinching. He does not pretend the record is clean. He says he is not reaching back for it.

You are somebody whose two failed gardens have no authority over what your hands do today, and God has never once required a clean record before a man puts something in the ground. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man kneeling at a wall, and the Holy Spirit who is with you out here is the evidence that nothing is being scored.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic on your knees. If forgetting means not reaching back, then two failed attempts are information about a named summer and a set of reasons you never found. They are not the thing you are reaching for, and they never had the standing to become that.

Nobody here is asking you to name it

Here is the second thing, and it is the whole difference between this page and the ones that get closed halfway.

Nothing here is telling you to announce it. There is no need to tell your wife anything at all. You do not have to call it a fresh start, or a step of faith, or anything at all. If she asks and you say tidying up, this page has no objection whatsoever.

And nothing here promises the six take. Some of them probably will not. That ground has bad drainage and you know it better than anybody, and a page that promised you a harvest would be adding exactly the weight you came out here to avoid.

You have been carried through both of the failures, including the second one that has no explanation, and the carrying was never keeping score. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in you rather than watching to see whether the third time is different.

There is also no requirement to finish. If those six go in and nothing else ever does, and the strip goes back to grass by August, you have not failed at anything on this page.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a trowel. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not kept quiet against the possibility of a third failure. And the thing in the way is not the drainage and it is not the summer everybody names. It is a sentence: if I say it out loud, the next failure counts double. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority kneeling in wet soil. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in whether these six take.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than caution, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.