Plants and Pain: the Unexpected Way of Growth
Before we moved, I took a picture of all the plants I was forcing my poor husband to bring along for the ride. When you have a deep need for real, live greenery in the home and you also move every two years, you get really good at giving your husband the puppy eyes as you convince him that he absolutely can fit your eleven year old daughter’s 5 foot avocado shoot in the U-Haul trailer.
After we moved, I neglected to take a picture of the plants that had taken a severe beating by riding in the back of said U-Haul and also camping out at various places along the way. I did, however, mark in my planner for the first available Saturday "plant TLC” with a nice box all ready for me to check off once I was done.
But first, I felt a deep need to paint the rental…and then our household goods arrived…and then we had a visit from Ye Olde Langley Virus, that had been biding its time, waiting for me to be done with the moving and the painting and the unpacking before it struck—right when I was ready to take a deep breath and enjoy our new home (by which I mean order curriculum and prepare for the school year).
The Black Plague, as we fondly called it, had come for the Man on the very last day of painting. With the choice being between having him pass out while on top of a ladder or finishing the painting myself, I told him to lay down his paintbrush and let me take one for the team. He then spent the next week trying to survive the Plague while juggling starting work. It was not effective. I made it through the rest of the painting and then the unpack process by sheer dogged stubbornness, but I can’t say much for the quality of that last room worth of paint. Touch ups will have to be made.
Anyway, the point being that it wasn’t until nearly three weeks after we moved in that I finally got around to providing the plants with the serious triaging that they needed. And some of them had really taken a hit during the move.
Bee had to, in her words, “mercy kill” her avocado shoot, which involved cutting off about 2.5 feet of it. Several plants had to be severely chopped back, and almost all of them needed fresh dirt and repotting. A pothos that had been happily hanging in my kitchen for four years (in two different houses) lost at least three quarters of its mass, and my Swedish Ivy (fondly referred to as The White House Plant) nearly didn’t make it. I’ve had this plant for five years after a friend/mentor/person-I-hope-I’ll-become gifted me a cutting. She’d been given a cutting by another Air Force wife who’d been given a cutting by another Air Force wife who had gotten the original…from the actual White House. And my beautiful White House plant, which before the move was so lush that you couldn’t see the size-of-a-small-child pot it was planted in, was only saved by some quick thinking on Bee’s part when she trimmed off a healthy branch that still had some life and propagated it on the kitchen counter while I was busy unpacking like a mad woman and then trying not to succumb to imminent death.
Okay, now that I’ve weeded out (pun intended) all the people who don’t care about my plant details, let me get back to the rest of it. Once the house was painted/unpacked and the plants and the majority of the family had been brought back from the verge of death, I got back to my originally scheduled programming: steam rolling our family schedule into submission. Co-op and piano teachers and football and umbrella schools and church hunting and signing up for Costco and getting over the fact that I really didn’t want to sign up for Costco and meeting new people and trying to be sociable…and all the things that you have to do when you move. And if I could do it as quickly as possible, you betcha I was going to.
And…somehow in my Type A aggressive homemaking, I was reminded that God typically doesn’t work this way in us. Don’t get me wrong, He made me like this, and I’ve been using the gifts that He’s given me, but when He works in us…there’s no steamrolling.
In fact, the way He works in us tends to be a lot more like what my plants have gone through this month. Sometimes there are days when we feel like we are crammed in the pack of a lightless U-Haul trailer, bumping over roads we can’t see. Sometimes we are uncomfortable when there’s too much sun and not enough AC because we’ve been left where we don’t want to be. Sometimes there’s a lot of letting things die off. Sometimes He has to actively cut off the dead leaves and branches—and it hurts. Sometimes He has to upend us, shake our roots loose, and put us in fresh soil.
And even then, the growth isn’t instantaneous. It’s slow. It’s one leaf uncurling at a time. It’s nearly invisible if you’re not routinely watching for it.
In the part of spiritual growth formation that comes before the growth (you know, the trapped in the dark trailer, broiling in the sun, having stuff chopped off you part), I often feel like Westley in The Princess Bride yelling, “Gently, gently!” as Buttercup smothers him in kisses. I know God is doing a good work in me, but I am pretty sure He’s forgotten how fragile I am.
But this isn’t The Princess Bride (unfortunately) and God hasn’t forgotten my fragility (thankfully). Instead, I’m the one who has forgotten. I’ve forgotten that the blessing God gives is the blessing I need, even if it’s not always the blessing I want. Surprisingly, I don’t know best.
The pothos that has hung in our kitchen for the last four years (you know, the one that had to be severely cut back because most of it died) is now hanging in our bathroom. Every time I rinse the shampoo out of my hair, I have a direct line of sight on that sucker. The first week, it made me sad. It had been such a beautiful plant. After the move, it looked a little like the plant version of Chucky. The second week, I started noticing little green spikes. I told myself not to get too excited. This week, the spikes are longer, which means I’m remembering we have a God who is referred to as "the God of hope”, so getting excited is allowed. Next week, I think some of those slighty-less-tiny green spikes may start slowly—slowly—unfurling into leaves.
It doesn’t happen overnight. Not for these plants, and not for us.
But my pothos and Swedish ivy are not clawing their way back to health. They’re not making To Do lists for themselves (grow another leaf! open up two more!). They’re not lying awake at night berating themselves for not yet having reached their full, lush potential. They’re not feeling guilty about all the leaves they lost or tendrils that shriveled during the move. They’re just letting the slow work of growth be done in them.
This is what spiritual growth looks like in us too. A lot of it out of our control. Sometimes precipitated by pain and discomfort and darkness. And then slowly. Without us forcing it. Without us really even doing much of the work. But if we’re paying attention, we’ll see it.
…if we’re paying attention and if we’re remembering that growth doesn’t always look the way we anticipate it looking (remember: the blessing God gives is the blessing we need, even if it’s not the blessing we want). And have you forgotten the avocado shoot that Bee had to “mercy kill”? Well, it turns out she should’ve had mercy on that thing several months ago.
Bee sprouted her shoot from a pit, just like every good homeschooler, planting it when the root had pushed its way out of the pit and deep into the glass of water where it was balanced. Once it was planted in a pot, the shoot kept growing and growing and growing. We’d put it in a bigger pot, and it would grow some more. An even bigger pot, and to grew some more. But no matter how big it grew, it only put out leaves, no branches. The leaves would grow big and then flop down by the stem, as if exhausted by life. Finally, it got to the point that it was take the risk of possibly killing it or know that it was never going to do what it was supposed to do: become a legitimate tree.
Within a week of Bee chopping off half the height of her tree? Would you look at that!? Little tiny branchlets made an appearance. (Please note that some of the big old floppy leaves are still hanging on for dear life.)
So. That’s what I’m sitting with now.
Little branchlets on a chopped down tree. Little leaf shoots poking out of what used to be a beautiful plant and will be (one day!) again. And the hope that God is going to gently (GENTLY!) keep doing His work in me—no matter what that looks like, no matter what painful circumstances precipitate that growth, and no matter how long it takes.
