The Evening the Garden Did Nothing

The tomatoes are staked and tied and the beans are most of the way up the strings, and out there everything is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing.

She comes out at seven, the way she has come out at seven for as long as anyone can remember. That hour is hers. The can, the tap, the deadheading, the smell that comes off tomato leaves when you brush past them.

Tonight she stands at the end of the bean row with the can in her hand and nothing happens.

Not sadness. Nothing at all. The evening does the same thing it always does, the light going long and gold down the rows and the swallows working the air over the fence, and none of it reaches her.

She waters anyway, because the plants are not at fault. She pulls two weeds. She turns the bucket over and sits down on it with the can empty beside her.

Nothing out here is wrong. Nothing out here has ever been wrong. This has been a good hour in a good life and it has held her together through weeks she would not want to describe. It is simply not doing the thing tonight.

Two gardens over somebody starts a mower and gives up on it. The light comes flat across the beans and lights up the underside of every leaf.

She sits there on the bucket and cannot think where else to put herself.

You are the one on the bucket. The thing you go to is not reaching you tonight, and nothing dramatic happened, it just went flat in your hands, and you are sitting there with no idea where a person is supposed to take this.

Nothing in those rows was ever the problem

Start here, because if we start anywhere else you will spend the evening indicting something that does not deserve it.

The garden is good. Whatever your rows are, they are good. God made a world where a person is genuinely steadied by ordinary things, by work and weather and the smell of a leaf, and He is the one who made you able to be steadied that way. Nobody is going to stand here and tell you that the thing which has carried you is a sin.

The trouble is not that it was bad. The trouble is that it was small, and you have been asking it to carry something the size of God.

You are not being told off tonight, and the flatness in your hands is not a punishment for loving something ordinary. Scripture says God gives us richly all things to enjoy, and it also says the soul was made for Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has let the evening go quiet rather than let you go on pouring an ocean into a jug. That is care and not correction.

Thirst is not a fault, it is a compass

Now the verse, and I want you to notice where the man is standing when he says it.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

David is in the wilderness of Judah. There is no water. And instead of writing a psalm about the drought, he writes one about what the drought is doing to his attention: my soul thirsteth for thee. He takes the dryness and reads it as a pointer, and follows the needle all the way to God.

That is the whole move, and it is available to you on an upturned bucket in July. The flat feeling is not evidence that you are broken or that you have used yourself up. Thirst is a working sense. It is the body telling the truth about what it needs and where it is not going to get it.

You have a thirst tonight that is functioning exactly as it was designed to function, and it is pointing, not accusing. That is Psalm 63 and not my kind interpretation of your evening, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a longing alive in a person long past the point where they would have talked themselves out of it. What went flat did not take your capacity for God with it. It uncovered it.

And notice the word early. He is not waiting for a better hour or a state of mind that would make the seeking look more sincere. Early, in the dry place, as he is.

Turn on the spot, with your feet

Here is the part that surprises people, and it is the reason this can happen tonight and not later.

There is no journey in this. You do not have to get up off the bucket and go somewhere holy. In the Gospels people turn toward Jesus from wherever they already are: from a tree, from a well at noon, from the edge of a crowd with a hand out. The turn is bodily and it is immediate and it happens on the spot.

So do it on the spot. Stand up in the row. Turn and face a different way on purpose, the fence, the ridge, the last of the light, and let your body say what your mouth is about to say. Then say one sentence out loud toward God, and let the sentence be as plain as your hands are dirty.

You have a God who is not at the end of a road tonight, and turning toward Him is a thing you can do standing in a bean row with an empty can. His word never once sends a thirsty person on a march before they may drink, and the Holy Spirit is nearer to you in that garden than the mower two gardens over. The hour it stopped working is the hour you turn. That is not bad timing. That is the appointed timing.