I Tell People I Am Not A Plant Person

I am not a plant person.

You have said that so many times that you could not begin to count them, and at some point in the last thirty years it stopped being a remark and became a fact about you, and you were not present at the moment it changed.

That is what I want to look at. Not plants. The changeover.

Because there was a first time you said it, and on that first occasion it was simply true in the small way that things are true. You had killed something, or you had never tried, and somebody asked, and you gave an accurate account of where you stood at that moment.

And then you said it again the next year. And at a barbecue. And to somebody at work who brought something in. And to your daughter when she asked why the yard is the way it is.

And somewhere in that long line of repetitions, the thing quietly changed category. It went from a report about the past into a description of the man, and a description of the man is a very different object, because a description tells you what to expect in the future.

You are not the sentence you have been repeating, and a description said often enough has never once become a fact by repetition.

Here is how you can tell it happened. You do not check anymore.

A man with a report would occasionally test it. A man with a description does not, because the description already covers everything.

The renewing of your mind

There is a line in Romans about how a person actually changes, and the grammar of it is the part nobody preaches.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:2, King James Version)

Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Now look at the shape of those verbs, because it is not what people assume.

Be ye transformed. That is not an instruction to transform yourself. It is passive. Something is done to the person. And the renewing of your mind is the instrument by which it happens, not a task list handed over at the door.

You are on the receiving end of the verb in that sentence, and a man has never once been asked in Scripture to renew his own mind by effort. Romans 12:2 puts the transforming in the passive voice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the renewing that no amount of trying harder has ever produced.

That matters enormously here, and I will tell you why.

Every piece of advice ever handed to a man about a thing like this is an instruction to try. Think differently. Speak positively. Decide to be somebody else. And sixty odd years is long enough to have tried a few of those and to know exactly how long each one lasted.

The verse is not asking for that. It is describing a work done in a man over time by somebody other than the man.

You have been handed a job that was never yours in the first place, and self improvement has never once been what that verse was asking a person for. The Holy Spirit is the one who renews a mind from the inside, and the written word makes the person being transformed the object of the sentence rather than the one doing the lifting.

And notice what it says the renewed mind is for. That ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

Prove means test. Try out. Find by experience.

A renewed mind is not a mind that has been told the right answer. It is a mind that has become willing to go and see. Which is exactly the faculty a man loses when a description hardens over him.

You are being offered back the ability to go and find out, and a settled description has never once been able to survive a man actually testing it. The word says prove, which is a word about experience, and the Spirit of God is the one who restores a willingness to try a thing rather than to predict it.

What thirty years of saying it has cost

Let me be plain about the cost, because nobody has ever counted it.

Every time you said it, the sentence got a little more solid, and that is the obvious part.

But there is a second cost that is worse. Other people started arranging themselves around it.

Nobody in your family asks you about the yard. Nobody hands you a seedling. When your daughter set up her balcony she asked her mother. Not out of unkindness. They are simply working from the description you gave them, and they have been working from it for years, and they are being polite about a fact you told them.

You were never left out of anything, and a family working from your own description has never once been a family that stopped wanting you in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man the shape of a thing he built himself, and Romans 12:2 speaks about a mind being made new rather than about a man being left as he is.

And there is a third cost, and this is the one I actually care about.

Things got missed. Not big things. Small, ordinary afternoons. A morning out there with a child. Something on a step in April. Thirty years of small pleasant hours that a description quietly declined on your behalf.

I am not saying that to grieve you. I am saying it because the same arrangement is going to decline the next thirty unless something interrupts it.

You are able to have the next ordinary afternoon, and a description written years ago has never once had the right to keep answering on your behalf. The Spirit of God is the one who interrupts a settled thing without shaming the man it settled on, and the written word speaks of transformation as something still available to a person who has been the same for a long time.

Write it down and tear it up

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately physical, because a sentence that lives only in the air is hard to get hold of.

Write it on a scrap of paper. I am not a plant person. In your own hand.

Look at it for a second. Notice that it is nine words and that it has been running your yard for three decades.

Then tear it up.

You are able to put your own hands on a sentence that has been running loose for years, and nine words on a scrap of paper have never once been bigger than the man holding them. Romans 12:2 speaks of a mind renewed rather than a man defeated, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing on a porch while a man tears up a piece of paper.

I know exactly how that sounds. It sounds like something out of a magazine, and you are not a man who does exercises.

Do it anyway, and do it on your own where nobody sees, because the point is not ceremony. The point is that for about four seconds you will be handling that sentence as an object instead of wearing it as a skin.

And then put one seed in one pot.

That is the second half and it is the half that matters. The tearing up is symbolic and symbols wear off by Thursday. A pot on a step is not symbolic. It is a thing that is there in the morning.

You are putting something in the ground that will still be there when the feeling has worn off, and one pot has never once needed a man to keep believing in it overnight. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present at an ordinary step with an ordinary pot, and the word puts the proving of a thing in the doing of it rather than in the deciding.