She Stopped Buying Plants

Every year it is the same message and it always arrives in the second week of January, which is early enough to ruin January and late enough that there is nothing anybody can do about it. We will know about renewals by the end of March. Nine years of that message. Six renewals, two moves, one year she spent from March to August in temporary work she never talks about.

Somewhere around year four she stopped buying plants. She could not tell you the day. There was no decision, no moment of grim resolve, nothing she could point at. She was in a store, and there was a rack of them by the door, and she picked one up, and she put it back. And then she did that again in the spring, and again the year after that, and by year six the windowsill in her kitchen was a clean empty shelf and she had stopped noticing it was empty.

Her friend noticed. Her friend came over in February, stood at the sink filling the kettle, looked at the sill and said, without any weight at all, "You used to have that big trailing one." And she said something light back, and changed the subject, and then thought about it for four days.

Because it is not really about plants. Anyone who has stopped buying something small and living knows that. It is a whole quiet policy, made once by a tired person and then renewed automatically every year without a vote, and the policy says: do not take on anything that will need you past the end of March. And once that policy is running, it is not only plants. It is the class that runs in ten-week blocks. It is the friendship that would take a year to be worth something. It is every single thing that requires a future.

A heart that is fixed while the news is still bad

I want to put a psalm in front of us, and I want to read it in the order it is actually written, because the order is the whole point.

Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance. He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD.Psalm 112:6-7

Read that again and watch the sequence. The heart is fixed first. The tidings are still evil. The psalmist does not write that the news improves and then the heart settles. He writes about a person whose heart is already fastened to something while bad news is still a live possibility on the road, and it is the fastening, not the news, that makes them unafraid.

You are fixed, and it is your heart God has fastened, not your circumstances. That is not a warm thought laid over a cold January. It is what is written in Psalm 112, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and drives it into a person standing at a kitchen sink. The contract is annual. The heart is not.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not say the righteous have good news coming. It does not promise the renewal. It says something much stranger and much better: it says a person can be unafraid of a message that has not arrived, because the fixing was done somewhere the message cannot reach.

You have a heart that God Himself has fastened, and no January message has ever been given the authority to unfasten it. Psalm 112 is where the word puts it, and it is the Spirit who makes an old song hold a woman up in the second week of the year.

What the empty sill was protecting

Now the tender part, and I want to be careful with it, because this is exactly where a message like this usually turns into an accusation and I refuse to do that to anyone.

The policy was not cowardice. It was a reasonable response to a real history. A person who has watched things die in a March move learns not to take on things that die, and that is not a spiritual failure, it is a heart protecting itself with the only tool it had. Nobody needs to be scolded about a windowsill.

But here is what the empty sill was quietly promising, and it could not deliver it: that if you never plant anything, nothing can be taken. And that is true, and it is the wrong kind of true, because it buys safety by making the life smaller every year, and the smallness compounds. Nine Januaries of that policy and there is no trailing plant, no ten-week class, no friendship that needed a year.

They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.Psalm 92:14

That verse is about people planted in the house of the Lord, and notice where the planting is. Not in a location. In Him. Which means the roots go somewhere the moving van cannot reach, and a person who is planted there is fruitful in a rented kitchen the same as anywhere else.

You were planted in Him, and that planting has survived every move you have made. The written word puts the planting in the Lord and not in a postal code, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a page into a body.

You have roots that go somewhere the moving van has never once been able to reach. Psalm 92:13 says the planted are planted in the house of the Lord, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person green in a kitchen she cannot promise.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the truth about the Januaries. Being rooted in God is not a reason to carry something alone that needs a real person in the room.