Lifting the Root

The sapling came in a black plastic bag with the soil still wet from the nursery, and my uncle let me plant it because I had asked eleven times.

We dug the hole together. He showed me how to spread the roots instead of jamming them down, and how to firm the soil around it with the flat of your hand and not with your heel, and how much water, which was more than I thought.

And then he went inside, and I stayed out there, and about forty minutes later I lifted it up to see how it was doing.

It came out easily, which even then I understood was not a good sign. A few crumbs of soil, some pale threads, nothing changed. I put it back and firmed it down again with the flat of my hand exactly the way he had shown me, and I felt slightly sick, and I did not tell anybody.

I did it again the next day. And on the Sunday.

He caught me on the fourth time. He did not shout. He stood there in the doorway with a dish towel and he watched me kneel down and put the little tree back in its hole, and then he came over and crouched next to me, and he said:

"You are asking it a question it cannot answer that way."

I said I only wanted to know if it took.

And he said, "I know. But a root does not answer being looked at. A root answers being left alone. Every time you lift it to see whether it is growing, you set it back to the first day."

Then he said the thing I have carried for thirty years.

"You are not checking the tree. You are checking yourself. And a boy who checks himself every day will never see anything but a boy who is checking."

Now let me name what you are actually doing, because it is not a garden and it is not thirty years ago.

You repented. Properly, at some point, over some real thing. And ever since, you have been going back down to look at the motive underneath it. Was I sorry because it was wrong, or was I sorry because it got out. Was that grief or was it just embarrassment. Did I mean it or did I only want the feeling to stop.

And you have never once come up with an answer you trusted, and every inspection has left you a little less certain than the one before it.

I want to sit down next to you the way he sat down next to me. Not to tell you the question does not matter. To tell you who is actually doing the growing.

You are not the one who started it

Paul is writing from a cell to people he loves, and he says a thing about confidence that has nothing to do with their performance.

For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.Philippians 1:6

Read where the confidence is placed. It is not placed in them. He does not say I am confident in you, which is what a coach says and what your conscience has been failing to say to itself for years.

He who began. Somebody else started this. Not you, on an evening when you finally got serious. Him, before you noticed, in a way you did not engineer and could not now reproduce if you tried.

And He will perfect it, which is a promise about the finishing and not a prediction about your consistency.

So hear this, plainly, before you dig anything else up. You are a good work that God Himself began, and the fact that you cannot verify the motive under your own repentance does not put the work in doubt, because the work was never resting on the purity of your motive. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written confidence and puts it somewhere under a person's ribs where their own examination cannot reach.

Now here is the wound, and I am going to name it before I lift anything, because a lift that skips the wound is just noise.

Nobody ever told you that your motives would be mixed for the rest of your life.

You were taught, somewhere, in a good and sincere room, that real repentance is unmixed. That the genuine article is grief over the offense alone, with no self-interest in it anywhere. And so every time you have found a strand of self in there, and you always do, because it is always there, you have concluded that the whole root is false.

But Scripture never asks for an unmixed motive. It could not, because there has never been one on this earth outside of Christ Himself. The psalmist says search me and know my heart, which is a man handing the inspection over precisely because he cannot conduct it. He is not certifying his own interior. He is asking Somebody with better light to walk around in it.

You have been trying to do God's job with a torch you do not own.

And look at what your own anxiety proves, because it proves the opposite of what you have been reading it as. A person who only cared about consequences would have stopped asking the moment the consequences passed. That was years ago. You are still asking. The ongoing ache is itself the good work He began, showing up as exactly what it is.

There was a man five hundred years ago who could not settle whether his contrition was pure enough, and it nearly destroyed him, and the thing that finally set him free was not a better inspection. It was the discovery that the righteousness he was straining to produce was one God hands over, and that a person is received on the ground of Christ's finished work rather than on the ground of an examined heart. He stopped digging. He grew.

You are on that same ground tonight, and the Spirit of God is the one keeping the soil around your roots while you have been lifting them, which is the only reason there is still a tree.