I Walk Past The Plants Now

There is a part of the store you do not go down anymore.

You have not announced this. There was no decision with a date on it. But somewhere in the last year or two your route through that building quietly changed, and now you come in past the doors and go left instead of straight on, and you have never once said out loud why.

It is the plants.

And what makes this worth talking about is not that you stopped buying them. Plenty of people do not buy plants. It is that you look away.

That is a different thing entirely. Not buying is a preference. Looking away is a person avoiding something.

So let me say what I think is actually going on, and you can tell me if I have it wrong.

You do still want one. That is the whole difficulty. If the wanting had gone, the display would be furniture, and you would walk past it the way you walk past the paint. Instead it has a pull on it, and the pull is uncomfortable, and looking away is how you manage the discomfort.

You are allowed to want one again, and looking away has never once meant the wanting had gone.

And underneath the looking away there is a sentence, and I suspect it goes something like this: there is no point, because I will only kill it.

I want to get at that sentence, but not by arguing with it. Arguing with it would be a waste of both our time, because it is not really an argument. It is a bruise. And you do not talk somebody out of a bruise, you just stop pressing on it.

A bruised reed shall he not break

There is a line in Isaiah about how God handles damaged things, and it is more specific than people usually notice.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. (Isaiah 42:3, King James Version)

A bruised reed. Smoking flax.

Both of those are pictures of something that has nearly given out. A reed already bent. A wick that has stopped burning properly and is just producing smoke.

You are exactly the kind of thing this verse was written about, and being bent has never once put a man outside the reach of it. Isaiah 42:3 names the bruised reed as the specific thing He will not break, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line about damaged material land on a man in a store.

Now notice what the verse does not say.

It does not say the reed gets fixed. It does not say the flax flares up into a proper flame. It says He does not break it and He does not quench it, which is a much quieter promise and a much more useful one.

Because you are not looking for a transformation. You are looking to be left alone about it, and to still be allowed near the thing you want.

You have not been handed a demand to be less bent before you come back, and the One who wrote that line has never once required a reed to straighten first. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a bending thing without snapping it, and the written word says so plainly enough that nobody has to guess.

And here is the part that I think will land, if anything does.

The reed does not have to explain itself. Nowhere in that verse does the damaged thing account for how it got damaged. There is no inquiry. There is no submission of evidence. There is simply a hand that does not close.

You are under no obligation to account for how you got here, and the bent thing in that verse has never once been asked to explain itself first. Isaiah 42:3 opens no inquiry and takes no evidence, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a hand open around something that has nearly gone out.

Four losses are not a pattern

Let me do something practical with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is doing a lot of work here.

You lost some plants. Let us say four, because it usually is about four.

Your mind has taken those four events and drawn a line through them and called it a trend. That is what minds do. It is efficient and most of the time it is useful, and here it is producing a false result.

Four is not a sample. Four is four.

You are looking at four separate accidents and not at a trend, and a small number of losses has never once been permitted to describe a man. The Holy Spirit is the one who refuses to let a tally stand in for a person, and Isaiah 42:3 deals with the bruised reed itself rather than with the count of how often it bent.

And they were not four instances of one thing. They were four separate events with four different causes, most of which were nothing to do with you: one came out of a heated store already stressed, one was a species that needed conditions your room does not have and nobody told you, one was sold at the wrong time of year, and one may genuinely have had no reason at all.

You were reading four unrelated events as one report on your character, and four separate accidents have never once added up to a verdict. The word describes a God who deals with the bruised reed and not with a tally, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an inference out of a man's hands.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that is just flattery, and flattery will not hold when the fifth one dies.

I am not telling you that you did everything right. Maybe you did not. Maybe one of them was thirsty and you were away.

You are able to have got something wrong without that being who you are, and one mistake has never once earned a man a permanent title. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a thing done from the person who did it, and Isaiah 42:3 is God refusing to break what is already bent rather than pointing at how it bent.

That is the whole difference. A thing you did is an event. A thing you are is a sentence. And you have quietly converted the first into the second.

Go and stand in front of them

So here is what I want, and it is going to sound like nothing.

Go and stand in front of the plants. One minute. Buy nothing.

I mean it about buying nothing. Buying one turns this into another attempt, and another attempt has a result, and a result is the thing that has been getting avoided for two years. That is not what this is for.

This is for the looking.

Stand there for one minute like a man with every right to be there. Look at them properly, the way it was before any of this started. Notice which one would get picked if picking were happening. Then put your hands in your pockets and walk out with nothing.

You are permitted to stand in front of a thing you want without owing anybody an outcome, and wanting has never once obliged a man to prove something. Isaiah 42:3 says the smoking flax is not quenched, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing still in a store for sixty seconds.

Why does this work? Because avoidance grows in the dark. That part of the building got heavy precisely because it never once got tested. It simply did not get visited. And a place nobody goes near keeps whatever size the imagination gave it.

One minute in front of it, with nothing at stake, and it starts to be a shelf with plants on it again.

You are able to go back to a place you have been avoiding, and a route around something has never once been the only route available. The Holy Spirit is the one who walks a man back toward what he sidestepped, and the written word promises a hand that does not break the bending thing when he gets there.