I Do Not Want To Plant There Again

There is a corner you do not use now.

You have never said it out loud and you have never made a decision about it. What has actually happened is that when you are choosing where to put something, that corner does not come up. It has quietly stopped being on the list.

And you know exactly why. That is where the one you cared about was.

Let me be honest about what that is, and then be gentle about it, because I do not think you need to be told off.

It is superstition. Not in a dramatic sense. In the ordinary human sense in which a person avoids a spot where something bad happened, which is one of the oldest things people do and which nobody has to be taught.

You are not losing ground to anything real, and a square of soil has never once been contaminated by what happened in it.

And here is what makes it worth an article rather than a sentence.

It spreads. That is the actual issue. Because there will be another loss somewhere, because there always is, and that place will come off the list too. And then a third.

A woman with a garden and twenty years is a woman with a great many places where something once died, and if each one retires the ground it happened in, the garden shrinks by a square at a time and nobody ever notices it happening.

I will even make a way in the wilderness

There is a line in Isaiah that puts the new thing in the least likely place available, and it is worth reading the whole sentence.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19, King James Version)

I will even make a way in the wilderness.

Now, notice the word even. It is doing something. It signals that this is the surprising part, the part the reader might not expect. Not just a new thing, but a way in the wilderness specifically.

The location is the point of the sentence.

You are looking at a promise that goes out of its way to name the unpromising ground, and God has never once located a new thing on the safe part. Isaiah 43:19 says even, which marks the wilderness as the remarkable element, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a woman avoiding one corner of her own garden.

And notice the tense. Now it shall spring forth.

Not eventually. Not once conditions improve. The verse puts it in the present, which means the ground being written off is being written off while something is going on in it.

You are retiring ground that Scripture puts in the present tense, and a place a person has finished with has never once been a place God had finished with. The Holy Spirit is the one who does a new thing in the ground somebody has closed, and the written word says now rather than later.

And there is one more thing worth having. Shall ye not know it?

That is a question, and it implies that the new thing can be missed. Not because it is hidden, but because somebody is not looking in the direction it is happening.

You are able to miss something by not looking at a place, and a thing going on in a corner has never once required anybody's attention in order to be happening. The Spirit of God is the one who asks whether it will be noticed, and the word puts the question in rather than assuming the answer.

The ground is not marked

Let me be practical about the soil itself, because there is a plain fact here that is worth having.

Nothing happened to that soil.

Whatever took your plant, in almost every case, has left nothing behind. Cold does not stay in the ground. A late frost is weather that passed through. Old age in a plant is old age in that plant. Even where something did stay, most of it does not persist through a season.

The corner is not marked. There is no residue. Soil does not remember.

You are treating a piece of ground as though it kept a record, and a square of soil has never once retained anything about what happened in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who deals with what is actually the case, and Isaiah 43:19 promises a way in the very ground that looked least able to carry one.

And here is the second half of the practical part, which is the harder one.

The marking is in you and not in the corner. That is not a criticism, it is just where it is located, and knowing where a thing is located tells you where it can be dealt with.

You cannot clean the corner, because the corner is clean. What can happen is that you can put something in it, and afterward there will be a memory of planting there that sits on top of the other one.

You are able to lay something new over a memory, and a place has never once been changed except by somebody going back into it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a way where there was no route, and the written word puts the way in the wilderness rather than around it.

That exact corner, and mark nothing

So here is the assignment, and the precision matters.

Put something in that exact corner, this week, and mark nothing.

Not near it. Not the square beside it. The actual spot, the one you have been going around, because a nearby square would let the retirement stand and this is about ending it.

You are able to go back into the exact place, and one square of ground has never once been beyond a person walking into it again. Isaiah 43:19 says I will even make a way in the wilderness, and the Holy Spirit is the one out there with a woman kneeling in a corner she has been avoiding.

And mark nothing. That is the second half and it is the one that will be tempting to ignore.

No label. No photograph. No note about what is there or when it went in. And in particular, no marking of what was there before, which the mind will suggest as a way of honoring the last one.

Because a marker keeps the corner special, and special is the whole problem. What you want is for that square to become ordinary, and ordinary means unlabeled, uncommemorated, and identical to every other square in the bed.

You are able to make a place ordinary again, and a corner with nothing marking it has never once stayed a special place for long. The Holy Spirit is the one present in an unremarkable act done on purpose, and the word promises rivers in the desert rather than a monument in it.

And if it dies there too, plant there again. That is the whole of the policy and it is not a hard one.