I Did Everything Right And It Died

You did everything right and it died.

Both halves of that are true and they have been true at the same time for about a week now, and the mind does not like holding them together.

So it has been trying to resolve them. That is what has been going on in you, and it is exhausting, and it is why this is still occupying you when the plant itself is long finished.

The mind is offering two ways out and both of them are bad.

The first is that you did not actually do everything right, and there is a step you are not remembering, and if you go back over it enough times you will find it. That one keeps you searching and it never concludes.

The second is that doing things right does not matter, which is worse, because that one does not stay with the plant. It gets applied to other things.

You are allowed to have done it right and lost it, and both of those have never once stopped being true at the same time.

And here is what I am not going to do in this article, and I want to say it at the top so that you can relax about it.

I am not going to tell you what it meant. There is no lesson in it, and I am not going to manufacture one, and I am not going to tell you that you learned something you would rather not have learned.

Something you tended died. That is the whole event. It does not have a second layer.

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that people usually read as a poem and it is closer to a plain list.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. (Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 2, King James Version)

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

Now, notice how those two sit. They are in the same line, given the same weight, with no commentary attached to either one.

The plucking up is not presented as the failure of the planting. It is simply the other one, named alongside.

You are looking at a verse that puts the planting and the losing side by side without ranking them, and Scripture has never once treated the second half of that pair as the thing that went wrong. Ecclesiastes 3:2 gives them equal weight in one breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old list land on somebody who has been trying to resolve a contradiction for a week.

And notice what the whole passage does not do.

It does not explain. There are fourteen of these pairs and not one of them comes with a reason. Nobody is told why there is a time to break down as well as a time to build up. The list simply states that both are in the world.

You are not being kept from an explanation that everybody else has, and a passage full of pairs has never once handed a reason to anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present where no reason is given, and the written word states the pairs and moves on without a single why in it.

And there is something worth having in the phrase that governs the whole list. A time to every purpose under the heaven.

Purpose is in there. Not explanation, which is different. A thing can have a purpose that is not disclosed, and the verse claims the first without offering the second.

You are inside something that has a purpose whether or not it has been shown to you, and an undisclosed reason has never once been the same thing as no reason. The Spirit of God is the one who holds what is not explained, and the word says a time to every purpose without listing one of them.

The refusal to extract a lesson

Let me be practical about the searching, because it has a cost and the cost is the reason for this article.

Every pass over it asks the event to be about something.

And it is not about something. It is an event. A living thing ended, in the ordinary way that living things do, after being cared for properly by somebody who did the work.

You are asking an event to carry a meaning it does not have, and a plant that died has never once been a message to the person who tended it. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a thing be what it was, and Ecclesiastes 3:2 names the plucking up without attaching one word of interpretation to it.

And here is what the search for a lesson is actually doing, which is the part I want you to see.

It is keeping you in it. A thing with a meaning has to be worked out, and working it out is a job, and the job has no end because there is no meaning to find.

If it has no lesson, it is finished. It happened, it was sad, and there is nothing further required of you.

You are free from an assignment nobody gave you, and a loss without a lesson has never once needed anything more from anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who closes what does not have to be processed, and the written word puts the two halves in one line and does not ask anybody to reconcile them.

Take it out and keep the pot

So here is the assignment, and it is entirely practical on purpose, because the practical is the answer to the interpretive.

Take the dead thing out of the pot and keep the pot.

Pull it, roots and all. Put it out. Then put the pot back where it was, with the soil still in it.

You are able to do a plain job with your hands instead of a job with your head, and two minutes of clearing has never once been a smaller response than a week of working something out. Ecclesiastes 3:2 names a time to pluck up that which is planted, and the Holy Spirit is the one at the counter while somebody does exactly that.

And keep the pot, standing, with the soil in it. Do not wash it and do not put it away.

Because putting it away would be a conclusion, and a conclusion invites a summary, and a summary is where the lesson would get written. A pot standing on the counter is not a conclusion. It is a pot.

You are able to end a thing without summing it up, and an object left in service has never once required anybody to say what it all meant. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets something be over without being explained, and the word states the pairs and offers no summary of any of them.

And if somebody says something about what you might take from it, you do not have to agree. You can say that it died, which is the whole of what happened.