The Tray of Tomato Plants

He is fourth in the line with a tray of six tomato plants and he cannot for the life of him remember deciding to pick them up.

It is the outdoor register, the one by the compost, and the line is not moving because the woman at the front is paying for a fruit tree in coins. There is a child behind him narrating everything her mother puts on the cart. It smells of wet peat and diesel from the forklift. He is holding the tray against his chest the way you hold a thing you did not mean to buy, and it comes to him that the last time he stood in this yard was eleven years ago, with somebody else, before the decade happened.

He does not tell the story any more. It was another person's decision, and it took ten years, and he did not get a vote, and that is as far as he lets it go in public. What the decade actually was, from the inside, was keeping the children fed and himself upright and nothing else, for so long that nothing else stopped being a thing he could imagine. Then a year ago something started. People at church call it restoration and he does not argue with them. But if this is restoration it is the slowest thing he has ever been part of. He cannot feel it moving. He goes to bed the same man he woke up as. He has started to think that a thing you cannot feel is a thing that is not happening.

The line moves one place. The child behind him says tomatoes, and her mother says yes, that man is going to grow tomatoes, and he looks down at the tray in his hands.

You know the tray. Whatever yours is, you know the thing you are holding without remembering picking it up, and the year that has been sold to you as a coming back, and the honest sentence under both of them: I cannot feel any of this, and I am tired of being told it is happening.

You are not required to feel it in order for it to be true. Mark 4:27 is written about a man who sleeps and rises night and day while the seed springs and grows up, he knows not how, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that growing in you at a depth your feelings were never built to reach.

What was taken, and what this is not

I want to say the hard things first, because this site was built to say them and a reader who came for the slow part deserves to have the taken part named properly.

The decade was taken. Not lost, not wasted, not mislaid by you. Another person made choices and you paid ten years for them, and your anger about that is not a fault to be corrected here. It is the right response to a real theft. And here is the second hard thing, and I will not soften it because softening it is the single most dangerous move on this domain: restored is not replaced. The ten years are not coming back. Nobody is going to hand you the decade in a different envelope. What God restores is the man, and whether He restores anything else is His and I will not predict it.

Now the pit itself, the one this article is about, which is not the theft. It is the pace. A year of what people are calling restoration and you cannot feel it, and the conclusion has begun to form that any sensible man draws from a year of feeling nothing, which is that nothing is happening.

Here is a farmer Jesus told a story about, and it is one of the least dramatic stories He ever told.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.Mark 4:26-28

He knows not how. Read the man's contribution to the growing: he sleeps and he rises. That is it. He does not feel the seed splitting under the soil. He does not hear the root. On the morning after he sowed, the field looks exactly as it did the evening before, and on the morning after that, and for a long time after that. And the whole while, under a surface that shows nothing, the growing is happening at a speed no farmer can feel, in an order nobody can hurry: blade, then ear, then grain.

You are being restored at that speed, and that speed is real. I am not speaking my own opinion over you. It is written into the parable, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the growing under the surface, and He was never going to send you a sensation to prove it.

Slow is not the same word as stalled

There are two sentences in you and they sound alike and they are not the same. The first is: this is slow. That one is true, and Jesus put it in the parable on purpose. The second is: this is stalled. That one is a conclusion drawn from the first by a tired man, and it does not follow, and I want to take it apart gently.

Stalled means stopped. It means the seed is dead in the ground. But the farmer in the parable has no way of telling a slow seed from a dead one by feel, because a slow seed feels like nothing and a dead seed feels like nothing, and the difference between them is not available to him. It is available to God. Which is why Jesus did not tell the man to dig it up and check. He told him it grows, he knows not how.

You have not stalled because you cannot feel movement. That is not the test. Scripture gives you no test in this parable except the one that is God's to run, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows the difference between slow and stopped in you, and He has not called it stopped.

And I have to say the other thing plainly too, because a man in a line with a tray will try it. You cannot hurry this. Nothing you do this week accelerates the blade into the ear. That is not a rebuke; it is a relief, if you will let it be one. The farmer who slept and rose was not being lazy. He was doing the only thing a farmer can do while the earth produces by itself, and the earth produces by itself is not a description of his failure. It is a description of how God set the thing up.

You were not given the growing to do. You were given the sleeping and the rising, and it is written that the rest is by itself, which is Scripture's word for the Spirit doing His own work at His own pace, and He does not miss a morning.