Eleven Days And Still Nothing There

Your finger went toward the soil again this morning.

You did not push it in. You got about an inch away and stopped, and you know exactly why you stopped, because you have already worked out that if you dig down to look at it you will damage it, and then you will never know whether it was going to work.

But you wanted to. You want to right now.

Eleven days. The packet said seven to fourteen, which you have read enough times to recite, and you are inside the window, and knowing that does not help at all, because the window is not the problem.

The problem is that there is no information.

That is what is actually hard about this, and I want to name it properly rather than tell you to be patient, which is what everybody says and which is not advice, it is just a description of what you are failing to do.

You are eleven days into a situation with no feedback of any kind.

You cannot see the seed. You cannot tell whether it split, whether it rotted, whether it is doing something in there or whether the whole pot is just wet soil with a dead thing in it. There is no signal available. Every single morning you go and look at a completely unchanged surface and you have to decide, with nothing to go on, to leave it another day.

That is a genuinely difficult thing to do and it has almost nothing to do with gardening.

Because you are probably waiting on something else as well. Most people who find themselves standing over a pot at seven in the morning are waiting on something considerably larger, and the pot has quietly become the place where all of the waiting collects.

He knoweth not how

There is a description in Mark of exactly this, and the strangest phrase in it is the one that helps.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. (Mark 4:27, King James Version)

He knoweth not how.

That is said about the farmer. Not a beginner, not somebody careless. The man whose actual work this is, who has done it every year of his life, and the text says plainly that he does not know how it happens.

And notice what he does in that verse, because it is a list of ordinary things. He sleeps. He gets up. Night and day. There is nothing in the description about supervising, checking, worrying, or standing over it at seven in the morning.

He sleeps, and it happens, and he does not know how.

Which means the not knowing is not a gap in your competence. It is the actual condition of the thing. There is no level of knowledge or attention at which a person gets to watch a seed decide to grow. It happens out of sight, and it has always happened out of sight, and the man who has done it for forty years is in exactly the same position at the surface of the soil as you are.

That is not a consolation prize. It is a relief, if you take it properly. You are not failing to perceive something that a better gardener would perceive.

You are standing in front of something nobody has ever been able to see, and the not knowing has never once been a gap in your competence. Mark 4:27 says the man sleeps and rises and does not know how, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a stretch where nothing at all is visible.

The dark is where the work is

Here is the part I want you to hold, and it is not sentimental, it is physical.

The eleven days are not a delay before the growing. They are the growing.

What is happening in that pot right now, if it is happening, is the least visible and most important part of the entire process. Water is getting into the seed coat. The coat is splitting. A root is going down, which happens before anything at all goes up, because nothing can rise until something has anchored.

Every bit of that is invisible by design. Not accidentally. A root goes down into the dark because that is where roots go, and the reason you cannot see progress is that progress in the first two weeks is entirely downward.

So the surface being unchanged is not the absence of the thing you are waiting for. It is the appearance of exactly what should be happening at day eleven.

I am not going to tell you it is definitely alive in there. I do not know, you do not know, and the farmer in that verse did not know either. Some seeds do not. That is real and I am not going to smooth it over.

What I can say is that unchanged soil is not evidence of failure. It is not evidence of anything, which is a completely different thing, and you have been reading it as bad news for eleven days.

You are looking at the appearance of exactly what should be happening, and unchanged soil has never once been evidence of failure. The written word puts the springing and the growing in a place the man cannot see, and the Spirit of God is the one who is at work where nothing is showing.

Once tomorrow, and do not dig

So here is the assignment, and both halves are restraints rather than actions.

Look at the pot once tomorrow, then do not dig anything up.

Once. Not four times. One look, at a time you choose in advance, and then leave it for the day.

You are not looking in order to gather information, because there is no information. You are looking because you care about it, which is a good reason, and once is enough to express that. The second, third and fourth looks are not care, they are anxiety walking to a window.

And then do not dig.

You already know this and you nearly did it this morning. Digging down destroys the root you cannot see and turns an unknown outcome into a certain one. The urge to dig is the urge to convert an unbearable not knowing into a bearable bad answer, and people do it with far more than plants.

If you need something to do with your hands, water it when the surface is dry, and no more than that.

You are able to look once and then walk away, and the second look has never once brought back any information at all. Mark 4:27 has the man sleeping while the seed springs and grows up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody standing over a pot deciding not to dig.