A Pot Of Parsley She Nearly Threw Out

Thursday, twenty past two, and she is standing at the sink with a supermarket pot of parsley in her hand and the bin lid up.

At twenty past two on a Thursday she would have been on the ward. Not doing anything remarkable. Handover, then the trolley, then the woman in bay three whose daughter always rang at exactly this hour to ask the same four questions.

Five weeks. The hearing took two days, and the room had a table in it and a jug of water that nobody poured, and at the end of it a man read out a decision in the voice people use for reading out decisions. Twenty two years, and a lanyard, and a badge with her name spelled the way she has spelled it since she was twenty three.

She has not decided what she thinks about the decision. Some days she thinks one thing and some days another. She is not going to argue it here at the sink and she is not going to defend herself to a pot of herbs.

The certificate is on the spare bed, face down, still in its frame, because she cannot put it up and she cannot put it in the bin.

Everybody has been very kind and everybody has gone back to work, which is the correct thing for them to do and also the thing that makes twenty past two on a Thursday what it now is.

Her sister rang on Sunday and said, God gives it all back, you know. Double, it says. She said mm. She has been saying mm quite a lot lately.

And she is holding a pot of parsley that she bought in a moment of optimism in the second week and then forgot about, that ought to be dead, and that has gone and put out new leaves in the middle, small and pale and unmistakable, on a windowsill in a kitchen where nothing else has happened for five weeks.

Maybe that is where you are. Holding something small and green and not knowing what you are allowed to say about it, because everybody around you has already turned it into a promise you never made.

The word first, because it is on the sign

Abundance, on this page, does not mean more things arriving. It means fullness of life, which is what the one verse the word comes from actually says, and it has never once meant a return of stock at the end of a bad year.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.John 10:10

Life is what is on offer in that sentence, and abundantly describes the amount of it. Not a catalogue, not a reversal, not a career handed back with the years put on the end. Fullness of life. That is the meaning this site works with and it will not be quietly widened later on.

And you have that, standing at a sink with a bin lid up. Not later and not on appeal, now, because it is written in John 10 that the Shepherd came so His own would have life to the full, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a Thursday afternoon that has nothing in it.

What Isaiah actually says about oaks

The verse this whole site is named out of has a line in it about trees, and it is quoted at people in ruins constantly, usually with a meaning attached that it does not have.

to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.Isaiah 61:3

Read what it says and read what it does not. It says planting. It does not say replacing. There is nothing in the line about the new trees being the same species as whatever stood there before, and there is nothing about when, and there is nothing that lets me stand here five weeks after a hearing and tell anybody what is going to come up in their particular ground. Anybody who does that is writing a forecast and calling it a promise, and I will not do it.

What I can hand you is what the verse actually settles. You are planted by God rather than dropped, and the phrase for it in Isaiah 61 is the planting of the Lord, which is a phrase about whose hand did it and not a description of the tree, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to receive that while the old certificate is still face down on a bed.

The parsley is not a sign and it is not a consolation

So what is the green thing on the windowsill. It is not a sign. It is not God's way of hinting that the ward is coming back, and it is not a small thing offered in place of a large thing, which is the offer she is braced for and would rightly refuse. It is simply alive, in her house, this week, and it is worth naming out loud for that reason and no other.

Naming it is harder than it sounds, because there is a fear that if she says out loud that something is alive, everybody will hear it as the grief being over. It is not over. Nothing on this page closes it. A thing can be alive in a house at the same time as a woman is standing in the wreckage of twenty two years, and saying the first does not cancel the second or settle anything about it.

So say it without paying for it. You have permission to notice something living without the noticing being turned into a claim about your future, and Scripture ties the growing to the planting of the Lord rather than to what a person can make of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps the noticing honest instead of letting it inflate into a promise nobody made.

It does not have to match

This is the part that took me longest to learn to say kindly. What comes up in burnt ground is not a copy, and you were never promised a copy, and the ache of that is real and I am not going to hurry anybody through it. What is written in Isaiah 61 is planting, and His Spirit is the one who can hold the ache and the green thing in the same hand without pretending either of them away.