Two New Shoots

The chairs are still against the wall.

Four of them, kitchen chairs, brought through years ago because parents used to sit there and wait, and there was a biscuit tin on the sill, and somebody's little brother always got at it. She has not moved them. Moving them would be a decision, and she has not made a decision about that room in over a year.

Fourteen months.

She still hears it in the way people manage the encounter. Not cruelty. Nobody has been cruel. It is the half second of arithmetic when somebody sees her by the bread in the Co-op and works out whether they have got time, and then the bright thing they say, and then the going. It is a town of nine thousand people and everybody knows, and she is not going to set it out here, and neither is anybody else, and it does not matter at all for what I want to say to you.

The phone stopped in the first fortnight. She kept it charged for months anyway, which she now finds embarrassing.

What is strange at fourteen months is that it is not news. It has become a fact about her, the way a person's job is a fact, filed and settled and no longer discussed. Nobody is angry now. Anger would at least be a live thing. It is finished, and she is the woman it is finished about.

This afternoon she is at the window with a mug going cold, because she has been standing there too long again. On the sill there is a spider plant she has not fed since before any of it, drooping, half the leaves gone brown at the tips, and hanging off it on two long stems are two new shoots with roots already coming out of them, feeling around in the air for something to land in.

She looks at it for a while and thinks: well. You would not know from looking at me.

Maybe that is where you are. Not in the middle of it, because the middle of it finished a long time ago, but in the long flat afterwards, where nothing is happening and you could not point to a single thing coming up.

The word, before I offer you anything under it

Let me get the word out of the way, because on a page called what this one is called, that word does a specific thing to a person who has lost a living and a name in the same fourteen months.

Abundance is not money, and on this page it is not your name back in people's mouths in that town either. It is fullness of life. That is the whole meaning, and it is the only one I have got for you.

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

Life is the noun and abundantly is the measure of it. Not a reputation restored, not a phone that rings, not a room full of chairs with people in them. Life, and more of it, in the person, which happens to be the one place a town cannot get at.

You have that, and fourteen months of being a settled fact in other people's mouths did not touch it. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own voice, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a woman standing at a window with a cold mug.

Isaiah says planted, not replaced

Here is the verse this site is named out of, and I want to read it exactly as it stands rather than as people quote it at you.

to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.Isaiah 61:3

Read what it does not say. It does not say the burnt field gets put back the way it was. It does not say the oak is a replacement for the thing that stood there. It says planted. Something goes into that ground which was not in it before, and it is called the planting of the Lord, which means the gardener is named and the seedling is not asked to explain itself to anybody.

And I am not going to tell you what is growing, or when, or what your life is meant to look like on the far side of any of it. Nobody honest can tell you that, and the people who try are guessing out loud in your kitchen. I am also not going to tell you there was a reason behind the fourteen months, and I will not tell you that what comes is worth what it cost, because those are the comfortable sentences and they are lies.

You are the planting of the Lord and not the leftovers of a fire. That is the written phrase in Isaiah 61 and not a nicer way of describing your situation, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the planting, which means it was never a job handed to a woman with nothing left to plant with.

Burnt ground grows things that do not match

The trouble with new life in a ruin is that it never looks like the old life, so a person walks past it without counting it. She is watching for the phone. She is watching for her standing in that town to come back. What is actually on her windowsill is two shoots on a plant nobody has fed.

You have things already growing that you have not been counting, and I say that on the strength of Isaiah 61 rather than on the strength of optimism, because the written word says the planting has been done and never makes it wait for the ground to look presentable. The Holy Spirit is the one who put them there, and He does not need them noticed to keep them alive.

It is worth saying plainly what these small things are not. They are not compensation. They are not the situation improving. They are not a sign about what is coming, and reading them as a sign is how people end up crushed by their own hope inside a month. They are simply alive, and alive is not nothing after fourteen months in a room where nothing was.

Name the small thing out loud

So the work of this message is small and it is not inspiring, and I am going to ask you to do it anyway. Name one living thing that is already there.

It will sound unimpressive. That is the point. Somebody who rang and did not want anything. A morning the first alarm was enough. A plant with two shoots on it. Something that was funny on a Tuesday, that you told nobody about.

You are not required to make it grow, and you were never the gardener in that verse. Isaiah calls it the planting of the Lord, which puts the whole of it on His side, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping something alive in ground you had written off.

You are seen this afternoon by the One who knows the whole of it, the part they got right and the part they got wrong, and He is not managing the encounter. That is written into Isaiah 61, where God comes to the ones in ashes rather than to the ones with a name, and His Spirit is the one who makes being seen feel like mercy instead of exposure.