He woke up and did an inventory, and the inventory came back short.
That is what he does on a morning after something has happened in him. He takes stock. What is standing, what is running, what is still in place. And this morning, after a night he genuinely meant, the list is not encouraging.
The circumstances are unchanged. The relationships that were strained are still strained and nobody has rung. The work situation is what it was. He does not feel any different, and one of the things he had quietly hoped for was feeling different.
What is left, on his own reckoning, is a stump.
Not nothing. He is careful and he would not say nothing. But nothing standing. Nothing that anybody looking at his life from outside would call growth, and nothing he could point at and say: there, that is what happened last night.
I want to name the wound properly rather than hurry past it, because a lift that arrives before the naming does not hold, and this man has been told to cheer up too many times by people who did not look at his list.
The wound is this: somewhere he learned that a life is measured by what is standing. Not by what is alive. By what is visible, upright, and could be counted by a stranger walking past. And on that measure his morning is a clearing with a stump in it.
That is you with the inventory.
You did your stock take before the light was properly up, and you counted what is standing, and the count was short. And you have not once considered that the measure you used is not the one the Bible uses for a thing that is cut down.
Job describes exactly what is under a stump
Job is not an optimist and this is not a cheerful book, which is precisely why this passage is worth so much. He is describing what a tree has that a man appears not to.
For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.Job 14:7-9
Though the root wax old in the earth, and the stock die in the ground.
Read how far he takes it. This is not a fresh stump with sap still running. Job describes a root that has grown old and a stock that has died in the ground, which is to say a stump that anybody assessing it would write off completely.
And then: yet through the scent of water it will bud.
You are looking at something Job describes as still able to bud after the root has aged and the stock has died, and I am not lifting a verse out of its weight: Job 14:8 and 9 say exactly that, in writing, in the middle of the hardest book there is, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get it to a man doing an inventory in a clearing.
Now, the phrase the scent of water. That is one of the most extraordinary images in Scripture and it is worth slowing down for. Not water. The scent of it. The nearness of it, the first hint, water somewhere in reach but not yet arrived.
A stump that has been written off responds to water it has not yet received.
You have a capacity underground that responds to the nearness of a thing rather than waiting for the arrival of it, which is written into that phrase rather than into my sympathy for a short list, with the Spirit of God able to make it land where an honest inventory has only made the morning heavier.
And this matters for your list. Your inventory counted what is standing, and Job is talking about what is underneath, and those are different measurements entirely. Everything he describes as happening happens below ground first, and nothing above ground changes until it has.
The clearing, the mist, the ridge and the water are all His handiwork and none of them are keeping your account. What is under that stump is not a verdict on last night. It is a root.
This morning is a stump with something living under it, and the budding starts at the scent of water rather than at the sight of it, because Scripture says through the scent of water it will bud, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a clearing at first light.
Change what you are counting.
Your inventory was honest and the numbers were right and the measure was wrong. You counted what is standing, and Job 14 is describing what happens under a stump, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can persuade a man to change the instrument.
The root aged. The stock died in the ground. Job takes it further than you would dare to, and then says the word yet, and puts budding at the far end of it, triggered by the scent of water rather than by anything visible.
You are met at the stump rather than at the height, and the capacity Job describes lives below where any inventory reaches, because Job 14:9 says through the scent of water it will bud, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a thing to stand on rather than a poetic line.
Do the day. There is something under there and it is not waiting on your list.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice this morning has left you, and a flat one is welcome. The standing to say them is not something a man works up to and it does not come off his record: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by what your inventory returned. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the stump. It is the measure you counted it with. Speak to that. What He does with the rest of it He does in His own way, and the breath is yours to take this morning.
- Verdict I gave the stump, you are not the assessment, and in the name of Jesus I take you back. Scripture says there is hope of a tree that is cut down, and it says it about a root gone old and a stock dead in the ground.
- Fear that a life is measured by what is standing, you did my counting before the light was properly up. Scripture puts the budding at the scent of water, so the capacity in question was never anywhere an inventory could reach it.
- Lord God, You keep what is under the ground and You start it at the nearness of water rather than the arrival of it, and I am sitting here with both feet on the floor and a short list. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit keeps the root and Your word said yet after the worst of it, and I am held at the stump and not at the end of something standing.
Job 14:7-9
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