I Cannot Throw The Dead Ones Out

There are four of them on the sill and they have been dead for months.

You know exactly which ones. You could tell me what each of them was and roughly when it went, and you could probably tell me what you were doing that week.

And they are still there. Brown, dry, entirely finished, standing in a row in the light like they are waiting for something.

Anybody else in the house would have cleared them months ago. It would take four minutes.

So let me ask the question you have been steering around: what would it mean if you did it?

Because that is the actual obstacle. It is not laziness, and it is not that you have not noticed them, and it is certainly not a shortage of four minutes.

It is that emptying them feels like signing something.

While they are on the sill, the matter is somehow still open. They are dead, and you know they are dead, and yet nothing has been formally concluded. Clearing them out is the part where you agree, in writing, that it is over and that it happened and that you are the man it happened to.

You are able to empty a pot without signing anything, and clearing a dead thing away has never once been the same as agreeing with it.

Remember ye not the former things

There is a line in Isaiah that sounds like an instruction to forget and is actually an instruction to stop staring.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? (Isaiah 43:18 and 19, King James Version)

Remember ye not the former things.

Now, that cannot mean wipe your memory, because the same book of the Bible spends whole chapters telling Israel to remember what God did. Scripture does not contradict itself that carelessly.

You are not being told to erase anything, and a command about the former things has never once been an order to pretend they did not happen. Isaiah 43:18 sits beside chapters that command remembering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a hard sentence from being read as something cruel.

What it means is closer to this: stop consulting them.

Neither consider the things of old. Consider is the word doing the work. It means to look at, to weigh, to keep referring back to. The instruction is not about memory. It is about where a man's eyes are pointed.

And your eyes are pointed at four pots.

You have been consulting four dead things every morning of this year, and a row on a windowsill has never once had anything left to tell you. The Holy Spirit is the one who turns a man's attention forward without demanding that he forget anything, and the written word says consider them not, which is about looking rather than about knowing.

And then the next line, which is the reason the first one is there at all. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth.

Now. Not eventually. The verse puts the new thing in the present, and the reason for clearing the eye is that something is happening while a man is looking backward.

You are standing in the middle of a now that Scripture puts in the present tense, and a man facing a row of finished things has never once been in a good position to notice it. The Spirit of God is the one who does the new thing whether or not anybody has turned around yet, and the word says now it shall spring forth rather than promising it for later.

Nothing gets signed

Let me deal with the signing, because that is the whole of the obstacle and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than argued away.

Emptying those pots has been turned into an admission.

But look at what you would actually be admitting. That four plants died. Which is a fact that is already true, and has been true for months, and is not made more true by a man carrying a pot outside.

The soil does not know. The sill does not know. Nothing in the universe changes its record because you tipped something into the yard.

You are not able to make a thing more true by clearing it away, and a fact that already happened has never once been waiting on your permission. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates an event from a man's agreement to it, and Isaiah 43:18 tells a people to stop considering things that had certainly and undeniably occurred.

And here is the part underneath the part.

I suspect the thing that will not get signed is not that they died. It is what their dying got decided to say about the man who watered them.

That is the document you are refusing. And you are right to refuse it, because it is not a true document, and no honest court would accept four dead plants as evidence about a man's character.

You are refusing to sign a verdict that was never lawfully written, and four brown pots have never once amounted to a statement about the person who watered them. The word makes no connection anywhere between a failed thing and a man's worth, and the Spirit of God is the one who tears up a document a man has been writing against himself.

Keep the pots

So here is the assignment, and the second half matters as much as the first.

Carry the four pots outside and empty them.

All four. In one go. Tip them into a corner of the yard or a bag, whatever is easiest, and do not be careful about it and do not have a moment.

You are permitted to do this quickly and without ceremony, and four minutes of ordinary work has never once needed to be turned into an occasion. Isaiah 43:18 says consider them not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes out to a back step with a man carrying pots.

And then keep the pots.

Do not throw the pots away. Stack them by the step, upside down, the way pots are kept.

This is the whole design of the thing. If you throw the pots out, you have closed the subject, and closing the subject is its own kind of verdict, and a quieter one. A stack of empty pots by a step is not a monument and it is not a surrender. It is equipment, waiting.

You are keeping the equipment and letting go of the evidence, and an empty pot has never once been the same object as a dead plant. The Spirit of God is the one who leaves a man with what he will need rather than with what he has lost, and the written word puts a new thing in the present tense immediately after telling him to stop looking back.

You do not have to plant anything in them. Not this week and not this month.