The Seedling He Pulled by Mistake

Seven in the morning on the third day, and he is out in the garden bed with his knees in the dirt because there is nowhere else to put his hands.

Good morning for it. The air still has some cool in it, the light is coming in low and long across the yard and lighting up every cobweb on the fence, and a mockingbird two houses down is working through everybody else's songs. There is a red plastic tub beside him for the weeds and he has been at it since six.

The call is coming today, or tomorrow, or Friday. Nobody would say. That is the whole of it: the not knowing has a shape now, and the shape is three days long.

So he weeds. It is the one job he knows that takes the hands and leaves the mouth free, and he has been talking, more or less continuously, to himself. He has run the phone call maybe forty times since Monday. He has done the bad version so many times that he knows what the room will look like when it comes, where he will be standing, who he will call first, what he will say to his wife, the whole thing, in order, like a man rehearsing a part he has not been cast in.

Then he sits back on his heels and looks in the tub.

Half of what is in there is not weeds. There is a whole row of small things with two leaves each that he put in himself, four weeks ago, on a Saturday, with the seed packet propped against the hose. He has been pulling them up for an hour without seeing them. His hands were down there in the dirt working at full speed with nobody driving, and what they were doing, quietly, methodically, all morning, was tearing out the things he planted.

He sits back and holds one of them, root and all, in the flat of his hand.

That is you, perhaps, on your own third day, with your own tub. Your hands have found something to do. And underneath the doing, the worst version of the call has been running on a loop since Tuesday, and it is costing you more than you have counted, and some of what it has already pulled up was yours and was good and was planted on purpose.

What the rehearsing is actually for

I want to say something kind about the rehearsing before I say anything else about it, because it is not a character flaw and I am not going to treat it like one.

The rehearsing is your mind trying to protect you. It runs the bad version so that the bad version cannot arrive and find you unprepared, because somewhere back there something arrived and found you unprepared and you have never forgotten what that felt like. That is not weak. It is a watchman doing the only job he knows, on a wall, in the dark, with no relief coming. Nobody here is going to call that unbelief. It is what a person does when they love their own life and cannot see three days ahead.

And I am not going to tell you what the call says. Hear that plainly, because it is the whole spine of this page. I do not know. I will not guess in the hopeful direction to make you feel better this morning and I will not guess in the other direction to sound realistic. Every line on this page has to work exactly the same if the news on Friday is bad, and I wrote it that way deliberately, because a page that only works for the good outcome is not comfort, it is a coin toss with a Bible verse on it.

What I have is a short psalm from a man who was somewhere similar, and the striking thing about it is what he does with his own insides.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.Psalm 131:2

Notice first that the quieting is something he did. He does not say the noise stopped. He does not say he got an answer and then relaxed. He says: I quieted myself. The situation is unchanged for the whole length of the psalm, and there is not one word in it about the outcome.

And then the picture, which is the part people rush past. A nursing child at its mother is there for what it can get; the whole visit is about the milk, and if the milk does not come the child screams the house down, and nobody blames it, because that is what it is for. A weaned child on the same lap is there for a different reason. It has come for her. It is not working the situation. It is not extracting anything. It has climbed up simply to be where she is, and it can lie there a long time with nothing being handed over.

You are able to be with Him this morning without an answer changing hands, and that is not a lesser kind of visit. Psalm 131:2 has the soul quieted before one word of news arrives, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a three line psalm about a child on a lap and works it into a man kneeling in dirt on a Thursday.

Three days is a long time to hold a phone

Now the pit, and I will name it straight.

Somewhere in the last three days the waiting stopped being a stretch of time and started being a verdict that is simply late. That is the turn that does the damage. As long as it is time, you can live in it. Once it is a verdict, every hour is another hour of a sentence you have already been given, and your hands go down into the dirt on their own and start pulling up seedlings, and you do not even see the tub filling.

Hear this carefully. The quiet on your phone is not information. It is not God being slow, it is not God preparing you for the worst, and it is not God about to surprise you. It is quiet. It has no message in it at all, and the reason it feels loaded is that a mind will fill a silence with something every single time.

Nobody failed to have enough faith to make the phone ring sooner. That sentence is not in Psalm 131 and it is not anywhere else, and if it has been said near you this week, put it down.

You have a soul that can be quieted while the phone stays silent, and the quieting is not a trick and not a result you produce. It is written that David quieted his own soul and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible in a body full of adrenaline, which is why this is peace and not composure.