One Of Them Came Up

You were doing something else when you saw it.

That is how it happens. You were going past with a bag of rubbish, or reaching for something, and your eye went to the pot the way it has gone to the pot every day for a fortnight, and this time there was a thing there.

Small. Bent over. Still wearing a piece of the seed case on its head like a hat it had not managed to get off yet.

And you stopped. Properly stopped, with the bag still in your hand.

And then something happened that you have not told anybody about, which is that you felt considerably more than the situation appeared to warrant. Something went right up through you, and there was a moment where you were close to something, and you were standing on a step in your own back yard looking at a shoot the size of a fingernail.

And then, almost immediately, you did the second thing.

You laughed at yourself.

You had a small internal moment of it is only a seed, and got on with taking the rubbish out, and by lunchtime you had filed the whole episode as slightly embarrassing and had decided not to mention it.

That second move is what this article is about. Not the seedling.

Because you had a real experience and then you canceled it, and you did that inside about four seconds, and you have almost certainly been doing that with small good things for most of your adult life.

And God saw that it was good

There is a line in the first chapter of Genesis about exactly this thing coming out of the ground, and what follows it is the point.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. (Genesis 1:11, King James Version)

And it was so. And then, in the next verse, the sentence that runs through that whole chapter: God saw that it was good.

Now sit with what that means for a moment.

The thing you are looking at on your step is in that sentence. Grass and the herb yielding seed. That is the category. A green thing coming up out of soil is the specific event described there, and the response recorded is that God looked at it and pronounced it good.

He did not scale it. There is no clause about how it is only a small green thing compared to the light or the sea or the stars. It gets the same verdict as everything else in that chapter, in the same words, at the same weight.

And notice that the seeing is written down at all.

God saw that it was good. That is a record of somebody stopping and looking at a thing and being pleased with it. That is exactly what you did on the step, with the bag in your hand, before you talked yourself out of it.

You were not overreacting. You were doing the thing the chapter describes God doing.

What you felt was the right response to a green thing coming out of soil, and it has never once been an overreaction to something small. Genesis 1:11 puts the herb yielding seed in the same account and under the same verdict as everything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when somebody stops and looks and is pleased.

The canceling is the habit worth breaking

Here is the thing I actually want you to see, because it goes far beyond a pot.

You are quick at canceling.

Something small and good happens, you feel it fully for about two seconds, and then a second voice arrives and puts it in proportion. It is only a seed. It is not a big deal. Do not make a thing of it.

And that voice thinks it is being sensible. It is protecting you from looking foolish, from caring too much about something that might not last, from being the person who got excited about a shoot.

But look at the arithmetic of it over a life.

The large good things are rare. Most people get a handful. What there is a great deal of is small good things, arriving constantly, in ordinary weeks. And if you have a mechanism that cancels the small ones within four seconds, then you have quietly disqualified nearly all the joy available to you and kept only the fraction that is big enough to pass.

You are not short of good things. You are short of ones you let through.

And it is worth noticing that the canceling does not protect you from anything real. If that seedling dies next week you will be disappointed whether or not you let yourself be pleased today. Refusing the gladness now does not reduce the loss later. It only removes the gladness.

You are able to let a small good thing through without putting it in proportion, and the canceling has never once protected you from anything. The written word records the seeing and the pleasure over what came out of the ground, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in four seconds where somebody does not talk themselves out of it.

Show it to one person

So here is the assignment, and it is small and it will feel silly.

Show it to one person today, in person or in a photograph.

One person. Somebody who will not be unkind about it, which you can judge, and which rules out one or two people you already thought of.

Take them out to the step, or send the photograph. And here is the important part: do not apologize for it in the sending.

Do not write it is only a little thing but. Do not say I know this is daft. That is the canceling, arriving in written form, getting there before the other person can respond so that you cannot be caught out.

Just show them the thing.

And notice what happens, because what happens is almost always that they are pleased. People like being shown things somebody is glad about. The fear that they will think it is trivial is a fear about yourself and it has very little to do with them.

That is the whole assignment. You are practicing letting a small good thing exist in front of another person without disclaiming it.

You are able to show somebody a good thing without disclaiming it first, and the apology has never once been required by anybody being shown. Genesis 1:11 has the green thing come up and be seen and be called good without qualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when somebody sends a photograph of a shoot.