Two Years Of Bare Soil

There is no wind at all.

That is the first thing you would notice if you were standing at that back door with him. The light is flat and warm and slightly yellow, the way it goes at half past four in late summer, and nothing is moving. Not the washing on the line. Not the leaves on the neighbor's tree. The whole garden is holding still, like a room where someone has just stopped talking.

He has a mug of tea going cold in his hand and he is looking at a rectangle of bare soil about the size of a door laid flat.

Two years ago that bed had tomatoes in it, and beans up canes, and far too much mint, because mint always wins. Then came the year. He does not call it anything else. Everyone in the house calls it the year, and nobody has to say which one. Somebody was very ill and then somebody was not ill any more, and in between there were corridors and forms and a lot of driving, and the garden went where everything else went, which is nowhere.

And the strange part, the part he has never said out loud, is that the year ended.

It ended. It genuinely ended. The corridors stopped. The letters stopped coming. People stopped asking how he was in that particular careful voice. And he is still standing at the back door.

He is not in trouble. That is what makes it so hard to talk about, and why he has never brought it up with anybody. Nobody is ill. The job is fine. There is nothing to report and nothing to fix, and he would look ungrateful complaining about a season in which nothing bad is happening.

He is just not anywhere.

Two years, and he has not put one thing in that soil. Not a seed, not a plant from the shop, not a handful of mint from a neighbor. He has weeded it, twice. He has looked at it perhaps four hundred times. He has stood at this exact door with this exact mug and thought, I should decide what to do with that, and then gone back inside.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have a bare rectangle too. Perhaps it is literally a garden. Perhaps it is the wall where the pictures were, or a box in the hall that has moved rooms twice without being opened, or a friendship you have not started up again, or a jar of pens on a desk you have not sat down at. Something has stayed exactly as the year left it, and you have been standing near it, not deciding, for a long time.

Sit down or stand, whichever is easier. Nothing here needs deciding.

Planted is not the same as growing

I am not going to ask you to make a plan. Let me put that down straight away, because you are braced for it, and the bracing is heavier than the request would have been.

Nobody here is going to ask you what your next chapter is. Nobody is going to ask what you are doing with the rest of it, or hand you a list of small steps, or tell you that the year was preparing you for something. It was not preparing you for anything. Psalm 1:3 describes a tree PLANTED by the water, and planting is something done to a tree, which is the Spirit telling you the placing was never yours to arrange. It was a year, and it was hard, and it happened, and I am not going to make it useful in order to make it bearable.

Here is what is actually true, and it is the whole message.

You have been diagnosing yourself as adrift. Drifting is the word that comes to you at the back door: no direction, no momentum, floating. And you have been reaching for a plan because a plan is what you think a drifting person needs.

But look again at what is in front of you. That soil is not floating anywhere. It is exactly where it has always been, in the ground, in one place, holding still. You are not adrift. You are unplanted in your own opinion of yourself, which is a different thing entirely, and it is not even accurate. Psalm 1:3 says planted, and the Holy Spirit does not use that word about anything that is floating.

There is a picture in the very first Psalm, and the whole strength of it is in one word.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.Psalm 1, verse 3

Planted. Not growing, not producing, not thriving. Planted. It is a passive word and it is deliberate: the tree did not choose the spot, did not dig the hole, and did not arrange the water. Somebody put it there. That is what the sentence is actually about.

And notice what is not asked of the tree. It is not asked to find the stream. The stream is simply beside it, and it was beside it while the tree was bare, and it is beside it in the season when nothing is showing at all. A tree in the ground in a still, windless August is not failing at being a tree. It is being exactly what it is: something planted, in the place it was put, next to water it did not have to go looking for.

You have been standing at that door for two years wondering when you will start living again, and the answer you have been assuming is that living restarts when you decide something. It does not. You are already in the ground. He put you there. That is what is written in Psalm 1:3, and the Spirit set you there rather than a decision you keep failing to make. The stillness is not drift and it is not decline, and nothing about this season is a measurement of you.