I Want To Plant Twenty More Right Now

One came up and now you want twenty.

It arrived about four hours after the shoot did. You were pleased, and then almost immediately you were planning, and by the evening you had a list and had looked up two things and had worked out where a second shelf could go.

And I want to catch you before Sunday, because Sunday is when this gets acted on.

You are not required to build on it, and one thing that worked has never once needed to become twenty to have counted.

Let me say what the impulse actually is, because it is not greed and it is not ambition and calling it either would be unfair.

It is an attempt to make the good thing safe.

One is precarious. One can die on a Thursday and then there is nothing. Twenty is a system, and a system has redundancy in it, and something in you did that arithmetic within four hours without being asked.

So the wanting twenty is not really about more plants. It is about not going back to nothing.

And that is completely understandable, and it is also how the one that just worked is going to get lost.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is about exactly this moment, and it names the precise virtue required.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. (Ecclesiastes 7:8, King James Version)

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.

Now, this is a beginning. A very good one, and beginnings feel like the main event because they carry all the energy.

And the verse says plainly that the end is the better part, which is a strange thing to hear when a person is standing in the excitement of a start.

You are standing in the part that feels like the main event and is not, and a beginning has never once been the portion that Scripture rated highest. Ecclesiastes 7:8 puts the end above the beginning without softening it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a woman with a list she wrote on a Tuesday evening.

And then the second half, which names the two options available to you this week. The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

Notice what patient is contrasted with. Not with hasty. With proud.

That is an unexpected pairing and it is worth sitting with, because it says something about what the hurry actually is. The rush to build on a small success has something in it that Scripture is willing to call pride, and it is not the loud kind.

You are being shown what the hurry has in it rather than only that it is hasty, and a scramble to scale something has never once been only about enthusiasm. The Holy Spirit is the one who names a thing accurately without condemning the person carrying it, and the written word sets patient against proud rather than against slow.

And I want to be careful with that, because I am not accusing you of anything.

The pride in it is not arrogance. It is closer to a refusal to be dependent on one small thing going well. It is wanting the security of a system rather than the exposure of having one plant, and that is a very ordinary thing to want.

You are wanting security rather than glory, and a desire not to be dependent on one small thing has never once been a vice in anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who understands the reach underneath a hurry, and the word puts the patient and the proud side by side without explaining which kind of pride it means.

Twenty will cost you the one

Let me be practical about what Sunday would actually do, because I think the mechanism matters more than the principle.

One plant gets your whole attention. You know its state. You notice the day it changes. You water it because you see it and it is the only thing there.

Twenty plants get one twentieth of that each. Which sounds obvious and is not, because attention does not divide evenly. What actually happens is that a few get looked after and the rest become a background of things that need doing, and the background produces a low guilt that was not there when there was one.

You are one Sunday away from converting a pleasure into a workload, and twenty of a thing has never once been twenty times the good of one of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person the shape of a Sunday before they spend it, and Ecclesiastes 7:8 rates the end of a thing higher than the excitement at the front of it.

And there is something specific that gets lost, which is the thing you actually had this week.

That plant was known. For about four hours, before the list started, there was one green thing getting looked at and nothing else pending anywhere.

That is what twenty removes. Not the plants. The unpending quality of the one.

You are holding something that has never once survived being scaled up, and a thing enjoyed with nothing pending has never stayed that way once a list arrived. The Spirit of God is the one who preserves what a person actually has, and the written word calls the patient in spirit better in a sentence about ends and beginnings.

Stay with the one, and put nothing else in

So here is the assignment, and it is a refusal rather than an action.

Stay with the one that came up, and put nothing else in this week.

Not none ever. This week. Seven days in which the only growing thing in this house is the one that is already there.

You are able to decline a good idea for seven days, and a week of not starting anything has never once been a week that cost anybody anything. Ecclesiastes 7:8 says the patient in spirit is better, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that kitchen while a woman leaves a list alone.

And do not throw the list away. That is important.

Throwing it away would make this about the list being wrong, and it is not wrong, and in three weeks some of it will be a good idea. Keep it exactly where it is and simply do not act on it until Sunday week.

What you are practicing is not restraint about gardening. It is the ability to have a good thing and not immediately convert it into a project, which is a general capacity and this is a low stakes place to try it.

You are practicing something considerably larger than a decision about pots, and a small deliberate wait has never once been only about the thing it was practiced on. The Holy Spirit is the one who builds a capacity in an ordinary week, and the word sets the patient in spirit against the proud in one short line.

And spend the week looking at the one. That is the other half. Not waiting out the seven days, but actually having them.