A Trolley of Bedding Plants

The trolleys at that place have one wheel that goes and they all have it, and every man in that county has said the same sentence about it and every one of them thinks he is the first.

Saturday, half nine. The busy hour. Rows of trays out under the open sky and a polytunnel at the back that is about four degrees too warm and that everybody goes into anyway. Somebody's granddaughter being allowed to choose one thing. A man at the till who knows what is in stock without looking.

Twelve trays and a bag of compost. Lobelia because his wife likes it, and something orange that he has bought every year for eleven years and cannot remember the name of.

He is a well liked man. He knows six people in that place this morning and he has stopped and spoken to four of them.

And every one of those conversations, he was managing.

Not lying. He has never once lied about any of it. He was doing something quieter and more tiring: watching how it was going, checking what had been said, running a small continuous calculation about what people know and what they might think and what a particular pause meant.

Nine years of that.

It is the most tiring thing in his week and there is not one man in that garden center who would guess it, and it has nothing to do with the compost.

Sit on the end of the bench by the roses with me, friend. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a long way back, took it to God straight and meant every syllable, and has been quietly running his own defense ever since.

And here is the honest part first: I am not going to promise you that the calculation stops. This message does not do that. What I will do is tell you whose job that was in the first place.

Whose job the bringing forth is

There is a line in Psalm 37 that a man in your position needs to read as a job description rather than as a comfort.

And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday.Psalm 37:6

Read who the subject of that sentence is.

He shall bring forth. God. Not the man. The whole psalm around it is a set of instructions to a person who is being wronged and is tempted to sort it out himself, and every one of them is about handing the sorting over. Commit thy way. Trust. Rest in the Lord. Fret not.

And then that line, which is the promise attached to the handing over: God Himself does the bringing into the open.

As the noonday. Noon is the hour with no shadows in it. Nothing at an angle, nothing half lit. It is the plainest light there is, and it is what God is described as bringing a person's cause out into.

Which means the job you have been doing for nine years, the small continuous calculation in every conversation in a garden center, was never assigned to you.

You are vindicated by God's own hand, and you were never the one appointed to manage what a county thinks. I am not offering you a lighter load out of kindness. The written word makes God the subject of that verb and puts the whole psalm around it into a hand-it-over frame, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and gets it to a man with a trolley and a bad wheel.

And He does it on His own timetable

Now let me be careful, because there is a way of preaching that verse that promises a man a scene.

I am not promising you a scene. Nowhere does the psalm say when, and nowhere does it say you will be there to watch it, and a great many faithful people have gone to their graves without the noonday arriving in a form anybody could photograph.

What it says is that the bringing forth belongs to Him. That is a statement about ownership rather than a schedule.

And ownership is the part that helps you on a Saturday, because a man who has handed a job over does not have to do it well. He does not have to do it at all. Whatever the calculation was accomplishing, it was not accomplishing the thing it was for, because the thing it was for is being done by Somebody else on His own time.

You have a cause that God has taken responsibility for, and you were never going to advance it by managing a conversation about lobelia. Scripture gives the ownership and withholds the timetable, and it is His Spirit, not a well handled Saturday, who lets a man put a job down that was never his.