Downhill For Two Weeks And I Do Not Know Why

You turned the leaf over again this morning.

You have done that about nine times in two weeks. You lift it, tilt it to the light, look at the underside, look at the stem where it joins, look at the soil.

There is nothing there. There has never been anything there.

And it is still going. Slowly. The one at the bottom went first, then the two next to it, and now the ones further up are doing the thing where the edges go before the middle.

And you have adjusted everything. You moved it, then moved it back. You watered more, then less. You looked things up, and every list gave you six possible causes, and your plant has some of the symptoms of all six.

Here is what has actually been happening in those two weeks, and it is not about the plant.

Every time you turn that leaf over you are looking for what you did.

That is the real search. Not what is wrong with it: what did I do wrong. And when the leaf gives you nothing, the not knowing is worse, because an unexplained decline means the cause must be something about you that you cannot even identify.

So before anything practical, I want to break that link, because it is doing more damage than the plant is.

Things die without anybody being to blame.

That is a true sentence about the world and you have probably never applied it to a windowsill. Living things fail for reasons nobody can see: something in the roots that was there when you got it, a bad season, a change in the air, an insect that came and went. Whole greenhouses of experts lose plants and cannot always say why.

You are not being told a shortcut here. This is not "do not blame yourself" as a kindness. It is that the causal chain you are assuming is not there.

A bruised reed shall he not break

There is a description of Christ in Isaiah, and what it says about damaged things is the point.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. (Isaiah 42:3, King James Version)

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.

Two images, both of something almost finished.

A bruised reed is a stalk that has been crushed. It is no use for anything. Nobody would keep it; the ordinary thing to do with a damaged reed is to snap it and throw it away, because it cannot do what a reed is for.

And smoking flax is a wick that has gone out. There is no flame left. It is smoking, which is what a wick does in the seconds after the light has gone, and the natural response is to pinch it out and be done.

And the verse says he does not do either of those.

Now, this is written about how God handles people, not plants, and I am not going to pretend a verse about the Messiah's gentleness is agricultural advice. Your plant is a plant.

But there is something here you need before you touch that pot, and it is about the disposition you are bringing to a struggling thing.

Your instinct, right now, in the second week, is judgment. Something is failing and you are hunting for the fault, and the hunt has turned inward. The verse describes the opposite posture entirely: a thing that is nearly gone is not assessed, not written off, and not snapped.

If that is how He is toward you, in the parts of your life that are genuinely a bruised reed, then it is certainly not required of you to prosecute yourself over a houseplant.

A damaged thing is not assessed and snapped in the hands of God, and a struggling plant has never once been a report on you. Isaiah 42:3 refuses to break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody turning a leaf over for the ninth time.

The adjusting is what is killing it

Here is the practical half, and it may be uncomfortable.

The likeliest thing hurting that plant now is the last two weeks of intervention.

Look at what has happened. It started to decline for some reason nobody can identify. You noticed, and you began to help: moved it, watered it differently, moved it again, fed it, moved it back.

Each of those was a reasonable response and every one of them was a change. A plant handles change slowly. It responds to a new position over about two weeks, and by then you have moved it twice more, so it has never once been given long enough to settle anywhere.

So the thing has spent two weeks reacting to you, on top of whatever it was already dealing with.

This is not a scolding, and it is the opposite of a fault. You were doing what a person who cares does. Nobody adjusts a plant six times out of indifference.

But it does mean the most useful thing available is not another correction. It is stillness.

And here is why that is so hard, and it is the reason I put the first half of this article before this one. Doing nothing feels like giving up, and if the plant then dies while you were not intervening, the verdict lands squarely on you.

That is why the link had to go first. If a plant can die without anybody being at fault, then leaving it alone is not a gamble with your own guilt. It is just the sensible thing.

A living thing cannot settle while it is being adjusted, and stillness has never once been the same as giving up on it. The written word will not snap the bruised reed or pinch out the smoking wick, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been helping something six times in two weeks.

Move it once, then leave it a week

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the difficult one.

Move the pot to a different spot today and then leave it alone for a week.

One move. Today. Somewhere with more light than where it is now, if you have anywhere, and if you do not, somewhere different is fine.

Water it once, normally, when you move it.

And then leave it alone for a week.

That means: do not water it. Do not move it again. Do not put your finger in the soil. Do not turn a leaf over. Do not look things up about it, and do not stand in front of it doing an assessment on your way past.

You may look at it. Looking is fine. It is the handling that stops.

Seven days. And write down which day the week ends, because otherwise on day four you will decide it looks worse and intervene, and day four is exactly when a plant that is settling into a new position looks its worst.

And here is the part I want to be honest about, because I said I would not do the kind thing at the expense of the true one.

It may die anyway.

The week may end with a plant that is worse, and it may not recover, and that will not mean the week was wrong or that you should have kept adjusting. A thing that was already failing sometimes fails.

If it does, it is not a verdict, there is nothing to learn from it about yourself, and you are permitted to be sorry about it without being guilty about it.

You are able to leave it still for seven days, and a plant that dies anyway has never once been a judgment passed on you. Isaiah 42:3 handles the nearly finished thing without assessing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody who has put the watering can away for a week.