I Let The Whole Thing Go Two Summers Ago

You opened the gate last week and looked at it and shut the gate again.

I know you did, because everybody does. That is the whole ritual. You go out with a vague intention, you get the gate open, you see waist high growth where there used to be rows, and something in your chest goes down, and you shut it and go back in and do not mention it to anybody.

Two summers.

And the thing that keeps you out is not the work. You know roughly what it would take and you are not afraid of it. You have done harder.

What keeps you out is that the state of it says something about you, and you have to walk past that sentence to get in there.

I am fifty eight and I have let things go. I want to say that plainly at the start so you know where I am standing. I have had a stretch where the outside of my life went unattended because the inside of it was taking everything I had, and I have stood at a gate exactly like yours and turned round.

So I am not going to ask you what happened two summers ago.

Something did. There is always something. Somebody was ill, or the work went bad, or there was a season where getting through the day was the entire achievement. Gardens are the first thing to go when a life gets heavy, because a garden is the one thing that will not phone you and ask where you have been.

And the garden does not know any of that. That is worth saying too. It has not been keeping score. It has been doing what ground does when nobody interrupts it, which is exactly what it did for the ten thousand years before you got there.

The judgment is not in the ground. It is the thing you carry through the gate.

A mind to work

There is a line in Nehemiah about rebuilding, and the part people quote is not the part that helps you.

So built we the wall; and all the wall was joined together unto the half thereof: for the people had a mind to work. (Nehemiah 4:6, King James Version)

Unto the half thereof.

That is what I want you to see. Not the finished wall. The report in that verse is that the wall got to half its height, and that is written down as an accomplishment worth recording in scripture.

Half a wall. Not a gate hung, not a job completed, not a thing anybody could stand back and photograph. Half.

And notice what the reason given is. Not because they had the materials, not because the season was right, not because they had cleared their obligations first. For the people had a mind to work.

A mind to work is not a plan and it is not a schedule. It is somebody deciding they are going to start on it. That is the entire stated cause of the half wall.

And then the other half of what that verse is doing, which matters for you specifically: they were rebuilding something that had been knocked down. That whole book is about a man going back to ground that had gone to ruin while people who loved it were somewhere else. Nobody in that account is described as at fault for the rubble. They are simply the ones who came back.

You are the one who came back, and going back has never once required an account of why you left. Nehemiah 4:6 records half a wall as a work worth writing down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man through a gate he has been standing at for two summers.

The unit has to be smaller than the shame

Here is the practical thing, and it is the whole reason this article exists.

Whatever you attempt out there has to be small enough that shame cannot get hold of it.

Shame needs scale. It works by comparison, and comparison needs something big enough to fall short of. If you go out on Saturday to sort out the garden, you will work for three hours, you will be surrounded by evidence of how much is left, and you will come in tired and further down than when you started, and you will not go out again for another year.

That is not a failure of willpower. That is what happens when a person carrying shame is handed a task the size of a garden.

So you do not sort out the garden. You do one square foot.

A square foot cannot be compared to anything. It is either cleared or it is not, and it takes about eight minutes, and at the end of it there is one patch of dark soil in the middle of the rest and it is finished.

That patch is not progress toward clearing the garden. I want to be clear about that, because if it is progress then you are back to the scale that keeps you out. It is one square foot of ground that is now soil instead of grass, and that is a complete thing in itself.

You are able to do a thing small enough that shame cannot get a grip on it, and one square foot has never once been comparable to anything. The written word writes down half a wall as an accomplishment, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes through a gate with somebody.

One square foot, then stop

So here is the assignment.

Clear one square foot of it. Only one. Then stop and go inside.

Go out with the intention of doing eight minutes. Take one tool. Do not take a wheelbarrow, because a wheelbarrow is a statement about scale and your body will read it.

Pick a square foot. Anywhere. It does not have to be the edge and it does not have to be sensible. Clear it down to soil.

Then stop.

This is the part you are going to argue with. You will get that square done and you will feel the thing that anybody who works with their hands feels, which is that you are warmed up now and it would be daft to stop, and there is an obvious next bit right there.

Stop anyway.

Because what you are actually rebuilding is not the bed. It is your ability to go through that gate without dread, and that is built by going out and coming back in intact. Nine times. Not once heroically.

And do not look at the rest of it on the way out. Look at your square.

You are able to stop while you still have something left, and stopping has never once been the same as giving up on it. Nehemiah 4:6 puts the half wall on the record without apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man walking back to the house after eight minutes.