Eleven Days And Still Nothing There

Eleven days.

You know it is eleven because you have been counting, and the counting is not helping, and you have not been able to stop.

And there is nothing there. Not a crack, not a lift, not a change in the color of the surface. It looks exactly as it looked on the afternoon you filled it.

So the question that has started forming, and you have not said it out loud because it sounds childish, is this: is anything happening at all?

Because from where you are standing there is no difference whatsoever between a pot where something is quietly under way and a pot with a dead seed in it. Both of them are brown. Both of them do nothing. There is no signal available.

You are not looking at nothing, and soil with nothing showing has never once been the same thing as soil with nothing in it.

I want to stay here for the whole of this article. Not move forward to the part where something comes up. Here, on day eleven, with the soil doing nothing and a woman standing at a windowsill wondering whether she has wasted a two weeks.

Because that is where you actually are, and most of what gets written about growing things skips straight past this part as though it were a corridor between two rooms.

It is not a corridor. It is most of the time you will ever spend on this.

He knoweth not how

There is a line in Mark's gospel that is the most honest sentence about growing anything in the whole Bible.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. (Mark 4:27, King James Version)

He knoweth not how.

That is said about the man who planted it. Not about a bystander. The one who put it in the ground does not know how it works, and Jesus says so as a plain and untroubled fact.

You are not missing a piece of understanding that other people have, and the man in that parable has never once been described as knowing what was going on down there. Mark 4:27 says he knoweth not how about the sower himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence take the pressure off a woman at a windowsill.

And look at what he does in the meantime. Should sleep, and rise night and day.

That is the whole of his activity. He sleeps. He gets up. He does it again. There is no vigil in that verse. There is no checking described, no anxious attendance, nothing but a man living his ordinary days while something goes on that he is not party to.

You are permitted to sleep and get up and go about your days, and a seed has never once required anybody's attendance in order to do whatever it is doing. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a thing going while nobody supervises it, and the written word has the sower doing nothing at all between the sowing and the appearing.

And notice the order of it. The seed should spring and grow up, and then he knoweth not how.

The not knowing comes after the growing in that sentence, not before. It is not a warning about whether anything will happen. It is a description of a man watching something happen and not being able to account for it.

You are standing in the exact stretch that verse describes without one word of alarm in it, and a stretch nobody can see into has never once been treated in Scripture as a problem to solve. The Spirit of God is the one at work in the part that is not visible, and the word records the not knowing calmly and moves straight on.

What eleven days of nothing actually is

Let me be practical, because the practical version helps here.

Underneath that surface, one of two things is true.

Either the seed is doing something, in which case it is taking in water, swelling, splitting its coat, pushing a root down before it ever pushes anything up. All of which happens below the surface, invisibly, for days, and the root goes first because a plant that comes up before it is anchored falls over.

Or the seed is not doing anything, in which case it is not.

You are standing over one of two possibilities and holding both of them at once, and eleven days has never once been asked to tell a person which one it was. Mark 4:27 leaves the whole mechanism outside what the sower knows, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman stand in front of an unanswered thing without deciding it.

And here is the thing: from up here, at eleven days, those two look identical, and no amount of looking will separate them. That is not a failure of your attention. There is genuinely no information available at the surface.

You have not been failing to see something that was there to be seen, and eleven days of looking has never once been able to produce a signal that the soil was not sending. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the part a person cannot see into, and Mark 4:27 puts the whole mechanism outside what the sower knows.

And I want you to have the bit about the root, because it is the most useful fact on this page.

If something is happening, the first work is downward. The plant spends its earliest days building the thing that will hold it up, and none of that shows.

So the period of no visible progress is not a delay before the work starts. In the case where it is working, it is the work.

You are watching the stretch where the actual building happens, and a period with nothing above the surface has never once been the empty part of the process. The Spirit of God is the one doing what is not visible, and the written word describes the springing and the growing as something that goes on while a man sleeps.

Look once, and do not dig

So here is the assignment, and it is two instructions and the second one is the real one.

Look at the pot once tomorrow. And then do not dig anything up.

Once. Not four times. And I am not going to pretend that you will manage once, because you probably will not, and there is nothing here to fail. If you look six times, look six times.

You are able to look at a thing as often as you need to, and going back to a windowsill has never once been a fault that needed correcting. Mark 4:27 has a man sleeping and rising without any account of what he did in between, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman who goes back to look again.

The instruction that matters is the second one.

Do not dig it up. Not with a finger, not with the corner of a spoon, not a careful little scrape at the edge to see whether the seed is still there.

I know exactly how reasonable that is going to sound at about day fifteen. It will present itself as gathering information. It is not. There is no information to gather that survives the gathering, because a seed lifted out of soil at day fifteen tells you nothing and cannot go back the way it was.

You are able to leave a thing in the dark where you cannot check it, and darkness over a seed has never once been the same as neglect. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps what is hidden, and the word puts the whole growing in a place the sower has no access to and calls that ordinary.

Water it when the surface goes pale. That is all the intervention there is.