You Do Not Lift Them to Look

Pointy end up, two inches down, and then the soil goes back over it with the flat of your hand and the clove is gone. There is a whole row of them in the bed already and not one of them shows. That is the entire job, four seconds each.

Fifteen people are strung out along the shared bed doing the same thing. Somebody's radio is on low at the far end and nobody is listening to it. There is a green wheelbarrow parked sideways across the path with a split bag of leaf mold in it, a dog tied to the fence post who has given up complaining, and a tub of flapjack going along the row that everybody takes from and nobody admits to making. Boots. Knees. Cold fingers. Autumn sun coming in low and yellow across the plots.

He has been coming every Saturday since March. He is good at this now. He knows to firm the soil and not to press it, and he knows the rule everybody learns in their first season, the one somebody says out loud to any newcomer fidgeting in April. You do not lift them to look. You cannot check a clove. Once it is in the ground it is in the ground, and you find out in June.

And all morning, underneath the flapjack and the radio and the ordinary talk about somebody's shed, he has been running the same sentence for six weeks. God, I am sorry. He gets exactly that far and something in him puts its hand up. Are you though. Or are you just sick of how it turned out. So he stops. He has been down after his own reasons with a torch more times than he could count, and he keeps coming back up with soil under his nails and nothing settled, and the sentence stays where it is, unsaid, because he is not going to hand God something he cannot vouch for.

That is you, on your knees at the end of the bed with a clove in your hand.

You're not confused about the thing itself. You never have been. What has stopped you is one step further in than that: you do not know what you are, and somewhere along the line you decided you had to know before you were allowed to come. So you keep going back down after the motive, and every time you get it up into the light it splits in your hand. Some of it looks genuine. Some of it is plain exhaustion, and relief that a season is over, and being tired of the shape your weeks are now. You cannot tell which one is driving. And a person who cannot certify himself does not knock.

I want to show you who was ever meant to be doing that examination. Because it was never you, and you've been sitting an exam that nobody set.

The test you keep failing was never set

Let me say the weight plainly first, because you've been carrying it in private and it deserves to be named accurately.

It is not guilt, whatever Scripture and the Holy Spirit would call it. You would recognize guilt, and you could work with it. This is subtler, and it wears differently. It is the suspicion that you might be a fraud in one very specific and unprovable sense: that the whole turn you seem to be making is only the natural reaction of a person who has run out of road, and that if the consequences lifted tomorrow you would be exactly where you were. You cannot disprove that, and that is what makes it heavy. You cannot get under your own reasons far enough to find out, and the trying is what is actually tiring you out.

Here is the sentence I want you to read slowly, because of where Jesus put the condition in it.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

Look at what qualifies a person.

The coming. That is the whole of it. Not the coming, provided the motive underneath has been inspected and cleared. Not the coming, once you can say honestly which of the two things is moving your feet. He put the condition on the movement and said nothing whatsoever about the quality of it, and He was not being careless with His words.

And notice how far He goes to close the door on the exact fear you're holding. He did not say He would probably receive you. He said He would in no wise cast out, which is Him running ahead of every objection anybody could bring, including the ones you invented about yourself on an allotment at four in the afternoon.

Now, there is a verse you may have had used on you. Somebody somewhere has told you that there are two kinds of sorrow and one of them does not work, and that sentence has been sitting in you like a splinter ever since, because you cannot tell which kind yours is. So look at what Paul was doing when he wrote it. He was writing to people he had already grieved with a hard letter, he was writing to reassure them, and he says outright that he rejoices. He is the one telling them how it went, not handing them a test to run on themselves. Nobody in that letter is asked to grade their own sorrow, and the thing he points at is not the temperature of anyone's feelings. It is what the sorrow went on to do. Which is another way of saying that it is a harvest, and you cannot appraise a harvest in the week the cloves went in.

So here is where the examination belongs. The man who wrote more about his own insides than anyone in Scripture ended up doing something with all that self-knowledge that I think would surprise you.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.

He did not conclude the examination. He requested it. He got to the end of what a person can honestly say about himself and he handed the job over to the only One with the reach for it, and that prayer is answerable. The one you've been praying is not. You've been asking your own heart to give evidence about itself, and your heart has an interest in the outcome, and the one who benefits from a verdict has never once been the right one to deliver it.

None of this is history. God is doing it today, in ordinary rooms, on ordinary Saturdays, with people who came to Him unsure of themselves and were taken in anyway. And I do not mean people in general. I mean you, with cold hands and an unfinished sentence, which is a far better place to be than you think.

You have no examination to pass at the door, and the mixture in you was never the disqualification. Scripture puts the qualifying in one verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can settle that where self examination has only stirred it.