There Is A New Leaf Coming

You saw it while you were reaching past for something else.

You were not looking at the plant. You were getting something off the shelf behind it, and your eye went down, and there at the base of the stem was a small tight curl that was not there last week.

A new leaf. Coming up rolled, the way they do.

And you made a sound. Out loud, in an empty kitchen, at a plant.

And then you stood there for about twenty seconds looking at it, and then you did the thing this article is about.

You caught yourself.

Some part of you noticed how pleased you were and stepped in to moderate it. You did not say anything out loud, but the shape of it was: it is a leaf. Calm down.

And you went and did whatever you had been going to do, and you have thought about it four times since, and you have not mentioned it to anybody.

That is what I want to work on, and it is not the plant.

Here is the thing about that moment of catching yourself. It was not humility and it was not perspective. It was an internal check that assesses whether a feeling is the right size for its cause, and it looked at that curl and reported: disproportionate.

I want to argue with the check.

Because you have been through a stretch where not much has been good, and on Tuesday morning something in you went up for four seconds over a leaf. That is not a malfunction. That is a person whose capacity for gladness is still working, and it found something to work on, and it worked.

And you turned it down.

There is hope of a tree

There is a passage in Job about a tree, and the striking thing is how much attention it gives to a small botanical fact.

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. (Job 14:7, King James Version)

There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again.

Now I want to be careful, because there is an obvious use of this verse and it is not the one I am making.

I am not going to tell you that leaf means something about your life. It is a leaf. It is not a sign, it is not a promise about your circumstances, and if I turn it into one then the next thing that fails in that house becomes a sign too, and I will not do that to you.

What is worth having is what Job is doing with the observation itself.

He is in the worst passage of his life, arguing about mortality, and he stops on a specific piece of ordinary botany: cut a tree down and the stump sprouts. The tender branch does not cease. He has clearly stood and looked at one, and he thought it was worth putting into the middle of the hardest conversation in the book.

Scripture does that constantly. Sparrows, lilies, mustard seeds, a hen and her chicks. Small observed things, noticed by people who were paying real attention to what was in front of them, taken seriously enough to be set down in the text.

Nobody in that passage is catching themselves for having noticed a stump.

So the noticing is not a small or foolish activity. It is the activity of a person who is present in the world, and it is all over scripture, and Job did it in a week considerably worse than yours.

Noticing a small living thing closely is what people in scripture do in their hardest weeks, and it has never once been treated as foolish. Job 14:7 stops on a stump sprouting in the middle of an argument about death, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody who made a sound out loud in an empty kitchen.

The check is not humility

Here is the practical half, and it is about the thing that stepped in.

That check has been running on everything, and it costs you more than you know.

It is the mechanism that decides whether a feeling is proportionate to its cause, and it is almost entirely one directional. It never tells you that your dread on Sunday night was too large for its cause. It never moderates the flatness. It only ever intervenes on the up side, and it intervenes fast, usually within a few seconds.

So the low feelings run at full size and the good ones get trimmed, and over years that produces a person who experiences most of what is difficult and about a third of what is good.

And it presents itself as maturity. That is why it has never been questioned. Getting excited about a leaf feels childish, and moderating yourself feels like the grown up move.

But look at what it actually did on Tuesday. Something good and real happened, in your kitchen, and you were glad, and a thing inside you took it off you within about four seconds and gave you nothing in exchange.

There was no benefit. Nobody was protected. You did not become wiser or steadier for having done it. You simply had less of a good Tuesday than you were having.

And here is the true thing about the size of it, which the check gets wrong. A new leaf is not a small event. Something in your house that was not alive last week is alive now, and it was made in that pot, out of light and water, by a living thing you have been keeping.

That is not a minor occurrence dressed up. It is genuinely remarkable and you had the correct reaction to it.

The check only ever trims the good ones and returns nothing for them, and moderating your gladness has never once been the same as maturity. The written word stops to look closely at a sprouting stump, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who was glad for four seconds and had it taken off her.

One minute, and tell one person

So here is the assignment, and both halves matter.

Look at it properly for one minute and tell one person about it.

One minute is longer than it sounds. Go and stand in front of it, and look at the new one: how tight it is rolled, how the color is different from the others, which side it is coming from.

Do not do anything to it. Do not water it, do not move it toward the light, do not take a photograph. Just look, for a minute, on purpose.

That is a different act from what happened on Tuesday. On Tuesday you were caught by it while doing something else and then moved on. This is choosing to look, which the check cannot easily interrupt, because you have already decided.

And then the second half, which is the harder one.

Tell one person.

Say to somebody: the plant on my windowsill has a new leaf coming. That is the whole sentence.

You will want to apologize for it. You will want to add that it is silly, or laugh slightly, or wrap it in something that shows you know it is not important news. Do not do any of that. Say the sentence flat, the way you would tell them it was raining.

Here is why this half matters most. A gladness that is never spoken stays private and unverified, and a private feeling is much easier for the check to overrule. Said out loud to another person, it becomes an event in the world that happened and was reported, and it is much harder to retrospectively decide it was too much.

And most people will say something warm back, because most people quite like hearing that a plant is doing well, and you will find the whole thing was less exposing than it felt.

You are able to say it flat and let it stand as ordinary news, and a private gladness has never once been able to defend itself. Job 14:7 puts the sprouting branch in the middle of the text without apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in front of a windowsill for a full minute.