The Pot She Never Repotted

There is a plant on that back step that has been in the same pot for eleven years.

It is alive. It flowers, some years. It is not a sad plant and anybody looking at it would say it was doing fine.

She has fed it, watered it, brought it in when it froze. She has done everything except the one thing, which is take it out and look at what the roots are doing, and put it somewhere with more room.

That is the picture. Here is the actual thing.

She came to faith in a year that she can still describe minute by minute.

She was twenty four. It was fierce and strange and wonderful, and things happened that year that she has never fully explained to anybody, and it changed absolutely everything, and she has been living on it ever since.

Twenty two years ever since.

She is not pretending. She loves God. She is in that building every week and she means it. But if you sat with her for an evening you would notice something, and her daughter noticed it out loud a fortnight ago, kindly, without meaning anything by it.

Mum, you talk about that year more than you talk about this one.

She laughed. And then she did not.

Because it is true, and she has known it was true for a while, and she has quietly assumed that what happened at twenty four was the whole allocation and that everything after it is maintenance.

If you have a year you have been living on, come and sit on the step. Nobody is going to hand you a scheme.

Rooted and grounded is a present tense

Paul prays something over people who are already believers, already in a church, already well past their own beginning.

That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.Ephesians 3:17 and 18

Look at who he is praying it for. Not new converts. Not people who have lost something. People in the middle of a settled Christian life, and what he asks for them is more root, more ground, more capacity to take in the size of the thing.

Which means Paul did not think anybody's allocation was handed out at the start.

You are not past the growing part, and there is no year in this that was the whole allocation. Ephesians 3:17 prays root and ground over people already saved and already established, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Paul asks in the verse before to strengthen them in the inner being, which means what happened when you were twenty four was a beginning and it was never the ceiling.

Nobody is asking you to recreate that year

Now let me say the thing that needs saying, because there are two mistakes waiting for a woman on a back step and both are common.

The first is to try and get that year back. You cannot, and it is not a failure that you cannot, and it is not what is on offer. What happened at twenty four was a planting, and a planting happens once, and a tree that spent its life trying to be planted again would never grow at all.

The second is to conclude that you have gone stale and need a scheme. This site does not hand anybody a system, and I am not about to start.

Nothing about those twenty two years was wasted, and nobody is calling them maintenance. What you took in at twenty four has fed a family, a church and a street for two decades, and the fact that it lasted that long says something remarkable about how deep it went.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Psalm 92:14 says they still bear fruit in old age and remain fresh and green, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that in a person, so there is nothing about your age in this that is a lid.

Here is the whole offer and it is smaller than you are braced for. Not a bigger experience. More room for the roots.

At twenty four you read like somebody starving. Slowly, out loud, going back over lines twice because they had hit something. Somewhere since then you started reading the way a woman checks a page she has known for years, and that is the entire difference, and it has nothing to do with the intensity of the year you began in.

You have not been living on a memory, and the supply under you did not stop when the fierce year ended. John 7:38 has Jesus speaking of rivers of living water flowing out of a person, and John names the Spirit outright as what He meant, which means what is under you is a current rather than a season you are remembering.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The root is not your achievement. It is where He planted you, and the pot was always meant to change.