My Father Could Grow Anything

Your father could grow anything.

That is not a fond exaggeration. It is close to a fact, and everybody in the family says it, and they say it the way people say a thing that has been agreed on for thirty years.

He put things in the ground and they came up. He took a cutting off somebody's hedge in a parking lot and it rooted. He never read anything about it in his life.

And you have killed a great many plants.

So somewhere along the way, without ever sitting down and deciding it, you concluded something. You concluded that the thing he had did not come down to you. That it went round you. That it stopped.

You are not a lesser version of your father, and a gift running in a family has never once been a debt owed by the next one in it.

I want to be careful here, because this is not really about horticulture and both of us know it.

There is a particular ache in being the son of a man who was good at something. It is not envy. You are not competing with him and you may love him very much. It is quieter than envy. It is the feeling of standing beside a thing you admire and being unable to do it, and quietly filing yourself under a heading you would never apply to anybody else.

And it gets worse if he is gone, because then the garden is the last of him you can still put your hands in.

Which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois

There is a line in one of Paul's letters that traces a thing down a family, and I want you to look at how it does it.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

Grandmother, mother, and then him.

Three generations named in one sentence, and a thing that ran through all three.

You are standing in a line that God has never once been embarrassed to trace, and being the third name in a sentence has never made anybody the smallest one in it. 2 Timothy 1:5 puts Lois and Eunice and Timothy in a single breath without ranking them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an inheritance read as a gift rather than as a standard.

Now notice what Paul does not do, because it is the whole point.

He does not say Timothy has his grandmother's faith. He says the faith that dwelt first in Lois, and then in Eunice, and I am persuaded in thee also. Same thing, three separate dwellings. It lived in each of them as itself, in that person, in their own house.

Nobody in that verse is a copy.

You were never handed somebody else's version to reproduce, and a thing that runs in a family has never once arrived as an imitation. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes up residence in a particular person rather than reissuing an old one, and the written word names three people and flattens none of them.

And there is something else in there worth having.

Paul says I am persuaded that in thee also. He is not measuring Timothy against the two women. He is looking at Timothy and saying, and there it is again, in you. That is a man looking for the good thing in somebody and finding it.

You are being looked at by somebody hunting for the good thing rather than auditing you against two people who came first, and that gaze has never once been the one you have been imagining. 2 Timothy 1:5 says I am persuaded that in thee also, and the Spirit of God is the one who says it over a man who has spent years assuming the opposite.

What actually ran in your family

Let me press on the assumption, because I think it is wrong in an interesting way.

The assumption underneath all of it is that the thing running in your family was a knack with plants.

I do not think it was.

Think about what your father actually did. He did not do anything clever. He put things in the ground constantly, and he did not care very much when they failed, and he never kept a record, and he took a cutting off a hedge in a parking lot because it cost nothing to try.

You are looking at a habit and calling it a talent, and what your father did has never once been out of reach of the man remembering it. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a posture from a gift, and 2 Timothy 1:5 traces a thing that lived in three people without ever once calling it a knack.

That is not a gift. That is a posture. He was a man with an extremely low investment in each individual attempt, doing a very large number of attempts.

And the reason things came up for him is not that he had something in his hands. It is that he was never once frightened of the ones that did not.

You have been trying to inherit the wrong thing entirely, and the ease you watched has never once been a talent you were short of. The word traces something that dwelt in three different people in three different ways, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a man that he has been measuring the wrong quantity.

Here is the difference between you and him, and it is not ability.

He planted a hundred things and lost forty and thought nothing of it. Six went in on your side, four came out, and a conclusion about a character got drawn.

He was not better at growing. He was better at losing.

You are able to do the thing he did, and what he had has never once been kept behind a door that was locked to you. The Holy Spirit is the one who hands a man his father's posture rather than his father's results, and 2 Timothy 1:5 is a line about something living again in the next person rather than being withheld from them.

One pot he never touched

So here is the assignment, and there is a specific reason for the shape of it.

Plant one thing in a pot your father never touched.

Not in his bed. Not in his soil. Not with his tools, if you still have them, and I know you probably do.

A pot that has nothing of him in it.

Because at the moment every attempt you make is happening on his ground, and on his ground you are always the second man. The comparison is built into the location. You cannot kneel in that bed without being nine years old and watching.

You are permitted ground of your own that answers to nobody's history, and one pot has never once been too small a place to begin something. 2 Timothy 1:5 gives the faith its own dwelling in each generation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man somewhere to start that is genuinely his.

And do not tell anybody it is a test. That is the second half and it matters as much as the first.

The moment you mention it at a family gathering, it becomes an event with an outcome, and there are people who will ask about it in three weeks, and now there is a result with witnesses. That is the exact arrangement that has been standing on your chest since you were a boy.

You are free to do a small thing with no one watching it, and a private attempt has never once been worth less than a public one. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present where nothing is being proved, and the word says I am persuaded that in thee also, which is God looking for the good and not for the evidence.